Gone Again
by Candle Beck
Summary: Slash, Sam/Dean. The worst thing that's ever happened to Sam.
1. Chapter 1

Gone Again

By Candle Beck

Several months later, Dean wakes up in the back of his car when it's still dark out.

His leather jacket is pulled over his shoulder in place of a blanket, and the seatbelt has left a numb silvered line on his face. His back is killing him, bones like fiberglass, and his mouth tastes thick and stale, his tongue slow against his teeth.

It takes him a minute to remember where he is. Two-lane country highway cut like a tear track through the forests of Oregon. Chasing something that he hasn't been able to put a name to yet, something that moves like a wind-made knife and leaves hikers flayed, hanging by their ankles from the trees.

Dean has been hunting it for a week now, or he thinks so, anyway. He lost his watch trying to hustle pool (distracted, the red felt on the tables kept jarring him, reminding him of someplace he'd been with his brother long ago) a couple jobs back, and since then he's got no real sense of the passage of time.

He sleeps when he's tired, wakes up a few hours later breathing hard and clutching at his chest. It's been like this for a long time. He thinks it's still June.

But Dean gets it all in place in his head and he sits up gingerly because you never know what might have happened in the night. It's still night, of course, and it's blacker than fresh tar, shadows as thick as asphalt and no moon.

Dean reaches for his bag on the floor and digs around blindly until he unearths a power bar and the little yellow bottle of caffeine pills that he substitutes for coffee when he's this far out. He drinks half a bottle of flat coke from yesterday and he's waking up, the dream forced down and fading.

He gets out of the car and the air is thirty degrees cooler than by day, but still heavy. Dean cracks his back and stretches and yawns. He's drained, beaten down thin as gold, and maybe it's only exhaustion but he can hear a malignant hum in the trees, smell murder on the wind.

He opens the front door, settles back in with his hand stroking across the top of the wheel, a little nervous tic that he's trying to get better about. For a long moment, he just sits there in the dark.

Then Dean lets out a careful breath and starts the car, says out loud, "Okay, Sammy, quit your whining, I'm ready. Let's go."

The headlights obliterate the darkness. Dean has always loved that.

(break)

The creature responsible for the skinnings is some kind of black demon-bird thing like Dean's never seen. Huge leathery wings thin enough that the sunlight bleeds through murky and broken by soot-colored veins, the curving talons rust-stained and serrated, long knifelike beak open and cawing in a terrible register, screaming as it circles.

It's got Dean pinned. Dean doesn't know how this happened. Following spoor and shattered branches, the sick rotted smell of the thing, Dean was on foot when it came howling down from behind. That shriek like a bolt of undiluted horror, and Dean chose hide over fight instantly.

This tree was struck by lightning years ago, felled and lying like a giant's immense club across the anarchic forest floor. Dean is crouched in the seared split in the wood, both hands on his gun, charcoal smearing in his hair, on the back of his neck. The bird thing plunges at him, beak stretched open and glittering with teeth, and Dean squeezes off two shots, aiming at the dark hole of the thing's throat.

A row of jagged teeth disintegrates into shrapnel, a short gout of tarry blood, and the thing screeches even louder and Dean's head is going to explode. He wants to claw at his ears until they're works of gore and he won't have to hear it anymore. It's going to kill him.

It might be part of the thing's attack. Dean might have come prepared for this, wax in his ears like in that Greek story Sam told him once, the sirens. But Dean has never been very good at figuring out the whats and wherefores. He's a man of action.

Enraged, the bird thing divebombs again, vengeance on hell's own wings, but Dean's waiting for it this time because give him three minutes under fire and he'll always come up with some kind of plan.

He swings his bag up over his head and the thing goes for it automatically, glassine jaws snapping shut on the worn canvas and the squeal of the metal inside, and Dean jams his knife straight up into the thing's throat.

A flood of black ichor drenches over him, hot as fresh-paved asphalt, and Dean cries out in disgust, throws himself back into the lightning split. The bird thing writhes, its great wings tearing out smaller trees, blood spraying out like swatches of night flung across day, and then it collapses, clouds of dust rising briefly before settling as grave dirt.

"Ew ew ew," Dean is muttering, scrubbing his face with rough handfuls of leaves and char and dirt, better dirty than covered in demon blood. His second-favorite jacket too, dripping and obscene, and Dean squirms out of it, tossing it onto the bird thing's corpse.

He crawls out of the tree and approaches the thing carefully, gun raised, but it's deader'n disco, its opaque milk-colored eyes darkening as he watches. Retrieving his bag from between the thing's jaws, he takes a quick inventory: the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun and a machete are bent like a pair of parentheses, but that's all. The gas can, astonishingly, is unpunctured and sloshing full.

Dean takes ten minutes to clear a firebreak around the humped creature, and then douses it. He says a quiet prayer for his jacket, tosses a match and watches the conflagration as it leaps and rises and consumes.

"I have slain a dragon," Dean says, and finds his voice rough and torn. "Bet you've never done that."

He glances to his right, and then bows his head. He's filthy and exhausted and his eyes are burning, but Dean knows it's just the smoke.

(break)

In Idaho, Dean sits for hours in a booth meant for two people at a bar meant for cowboys. Everyone leaves money at the end of the table when they want another round, damp soft bills flopping over the lip, weighted by an empty pint. Dean should have just bought a pitcher but instead he's done it one at a time.

This is the time between cases and this is really not Dean's strong point right now. The highways are swift and effortless when he's going somewhere, moving ahead bearing malicious purpose, but without destination they're more like prison: you can only go straight ahead. Only stop at the same truckstops and motels and bars, same towns scattered like driftwood all over the west.

If you're not going anywhere, you're trapped—this makes perfect sense to Dean.

So tonight he'll drink himself asleep and that makes it no different from last night or the one before. Soon enough he's gonna be broke again.

His father's journal is centered in front of him on the scarred table. Dean has one hand on it, absently running his fingers down the edges of the uneven pages. Dean thinks that he should add a flyleaf for the demon bird, attempt a childish sketch and write down everything he remembers, how he hunted it and how it died.

But most of the way through the journal, Dad's handwriting switches over to Sam's, neat entries with little college-boy headers that Dean would make fun of him for, lists of references that even included the publishers because Stanford had made Sam kinda crazy.

Dean doesn't like looking at the back of the journal much. Doesn't like the idea of his handwriting pressed against Sam's and blearing ink between the pages. It's weird and he knows it's stupid because it's information they'll—_he'll_ probably need again, but it doesn't matter.

Dean's his own boss now. He does what he wants.

He drinks for awhile longer, trying to think of other things. There are girls over there by the pinball machine, fresh-faced and capable-looking and usually just Dean's speed, but this weariness isn't going to leave him long enough for him to make it across the room. He keeps postponing dealing with the fact that he hasn't had sex with anyone in four months, four freakin' months and he's half-stunned he's still alive. He's really not the type to go without, and eventually it's gonna start to eat at him.

That's not tonight, though, and Dean orders two shots of whatever's highest proof and the waitress doesn't want to bring it to him.

"Really think you oughta quit, hon," she tells him not unkindly, empty tray shelved against her hip. "Been a long night already."

Dean shakes his head, ups the wattage on his smile, and holds his hands out to show that he's no threat. "You're a doll for worrying, but I'll be jus' fine. Get my brother to come pick me up, ain't gonna risk driving my baby, no ma'am."

She hikes an eyebrow. "You got a brother why're you drinking alone?"

Dean's grin feels brittle but he holds it, he holds on.

"My kid brother, only seventeen. Best kid you ever met, he'll take care of me."

One last lie and that's the one that takes, and Dean gets his two drinks, his head spinning, thoughts fragmented and clogged with factual errors, and he's glad because it's better when he's not able to remember specific things.

He learns the carvings in the tabletop with the tips of his fingers, not looking down and trying to guess the linked sets of initials inside their lopsided hearts, Bible quotes rendered in chapter and verse, rough-hewn angels and only one swastika that Dean can find, scratched over by so many who came after that it's very nearly indecipherable. Dean's slightly encouraged, a thousand right-making knives against one evil-minded blade, and he thinks there might be hope for this wicked world after all.

But then Dean's fingers stumble across letters paired with numbers and when he looks down, he reads in the cup of his hand, J_WL '62-'96 brother + friend_, and his throat slams shut, heart choked off.

Misplaced panic jerks through him, his hand clawing briefly at the inscription before his fingers press down flat over the word _brother_. He forces his eyes shut and sits back and focuses on not freaking the fuck out quite so much.

After a moment, Dean leans his elbows on the table and covers his face with his hands, bending forward hard and letting his mouth wrench open in a silent rictus against his palms. Then he scrubs fiercely over his face and through his hair, and gets up, fights the dizzying rush of blood to make it across the bar. He slouches down in the pay phone booth, rolling his head on the wall and clutching at the little shelf.

Dean hates this so much. He can never be cool when he wants to anymore, never a straight face with everything so close to the surface. Every day he sets a new record for the worst he's ever felt. He's honestly not sure how much longer this can go on.

He takes down the phone, dense black plastic weight on his shoulder as he digs for the wrinkled phone card in his jeans pocket, punches in the required bazillion numbers. He doesn't even know where he lost his cell phone; it hadn't been working for awhile prior because Dean hadn't bothered to pay for it. He waits, breathing shallowly, counting the rings.

Dean hasn't expected anyone to actually pick up in a really long time.

Sam's voicemail clicks on, sparse and clear and toneless, Sam, and Dean closes his eyes, slumps a little bit.

"Hey Sammy I need you to be alive right now okay. I swear I won't answer but please. It's, I'm. Pretty drunk. Um. 208 883 3147. I'm gonna sit right here and wait."

He pauses, his breath catching. There's a hundred other things he wants to say but he's not allowed. "I'll stay as long as I can."

Dean hangs up quickly. His face is heating and he thinks he might have just made a complete idiot out of himself but he doesn't know. He doesn't know fucking anything.

A minute passes and then two, three, and the song overhead switches from country to western and Dean is staring at the dried wads of gum stuck in irregular polka dots on the booth wall. Dean's hands are clenched in fists and pressed between his knees, and he's not counting the minutes, he's not wondering how long it's been.

The phone rings. It comes bursting at him, sudden and so much louder than he might have expected, and Dean's whole body jumps, his elbow cracking into the weak wood behind him. The phone rings again, shrill and cut off halfway through, and Dean grabs at the receiver, curls his hand around without removing it from the hook.

He holds it like he holds weapons, with reverence and deadly intent, and he bends forward until his forehead rests against the minor ridges of his knuckles and he stays like that for several minutes. He breathes out for the first time in however long it's been since he last confirmed that his little brother is still of this earth.

(break)

Dean has the dream again a few nights later, and it's always the same.

He and Sam are in some basement somewhere and they're supposed to be hunting, Dean knows this in a diffuse sort of way: there is something down here they need to kill.

But his mind's not in it and neither is his heart because Sam has him pressed up against the wall, and Sam's body is laid along his own so there's no place where they're not touching. Sam's breath hot on Dean's cheek, under the edge of his jaw and jesus, teeth like a warning, making Dean choke on a gasp. Sam's mouth is open against Dean's throat, changing a thousand definitions.

Hands tied up in his brother's shirts, Dean is trying to move but there's nowhere to go. The cement at his back must be three feet thick. Dean has made his peace with Sam turning out taller than him, but he's never really understood it like he does now, Sam's long long leg slipping between his own, the breadth of his shoulders under Dean's clutching hands, the way Dean is surrounded by him, locked up too tight for light to reach.

It's so amazing. Dean's hips are pushing forward because it's the only leverage he's got left and Sam is moaning in his ear and rocking back and it's just ruining him. Dean sucks at the triphammer of Sam's pulse, slides a hand into Sam's hair so he can get his head back, get a better angle, and there, _there_.

There across the room, surging out of the black, something indefinable and unholy with wet red eyes and a horrific gaping maw and Dean shouts, tries to push Sam off but Sam won't go, Sam won't _go_, hot as a star and saying _please_.

Sam is torn off him, one moment when his retreating face is sheer with surprise and fear and pain, his eyes white and growing huge. His mouth makes the shape of Dean's name but no sound comes out, a crimson trickle inching out of the corner of his lip, and the creature flings him aside like a bloody rag.

Dean draws and fires his clip empty inside three seconds. He doesn't realize he's screaming for the longest time, until his ears are ringing and his voice is gone, because he can see the monster draining its life into a spill of dusty moonlight, and it's got his face.

Dean slams awake. He tries to bolt upright but he's sleeping in the car again and only manages to ram his head into the door.

Groaning, Dean weaves his hands on the top of his head and scrunches down half-fetal. His heart is going so fast. Waking up always feels like he's about to die.

Waiting to calm down and stop shaking, Dean doesn't need a degree to interpret the dream. He's aware that he's seen_ The Empire Strikes Back_ too many times, and he can fill in the rest of his own mythology.

As it turns out, there _are_ ways in which Dean is willing to hurt Sam.

If it gets Dean back to that one moment, that senseless frantic thing that happened between them up against a motel room wall four months again, if Dean gets another shot at that, he's pretty sure he'll take it. Abandon his lifetime of vigilance, nevermore swear on his brother's safety, but instead live madly, corrupt and joyful and hopeless and never mind what it would do to Sam, never mind that. Dean would take it all.

It's a terrible thing to know about himself. It's why he let Sam leave.

(break)

There's a poltergeist in an old church on the California-Nevada border, and that's child's play, a thoughtless exercise, so Dean heads out. A hundred miles an hour through the desert and he drives by touch, by smell. He could close his eyes and never swerve.

Dean has a psychic link with his car that he never told Sam about because he doesn't set himself up for ridicule like that, but it's true. The Impala's always half a beat ahead of him, headlights flaring brighter on the signs he should pay special attention to, leading him through the webbed backroads when he's not even sure which state he's in. She's the only map he needs, out here in the American West where he has been living like a fugitive for however long it's been.

He's seventy miles out of Carson City when he gets a sinus headache and runs out of gas. The headache was her trying to warn him, Dean knows now. He'll pay heed next time.

She barely makes it off the highway, coughing and clattering and coasting with the clutch popped down the off-ramp, and comes to a juddering stop a mile from the truckstop. A tired guilty little sigh from the engine, the tires melting on the scorched asphalt.

"Aw, baby, that's not your fault," Dean tells her comfortingly with his hand petting across the steering wheel. "We'll fix it up no problem."

He's sweat-stuck to the seat and makes a soft tearing sound when he levers up to get his wallet out of his back pocket. He has two wrinkled ones and the buffalo nickel that he's had pocketed since he was eight, and that's all.

Dean huffs. "Fine state of affairs," he says to the passenger seat. "Middle of nowhere and broke and stuck and I swear to god this heat is not natural."

Nobody answers. Dean drops his head onto the steering wheel for just a second, just gathering his strength to face the weather, and then he rolls up each window one at a time and throws some stuff in his backpack and writes a threatening note to leave under the windshield wiper. He walks along the side of the road with his backpack slung on one shoulder, whistling the sad walking away music from _The Incredible Hulk_ in a mostly futile effort to keep his spirits up.

He's drenched with sweat by the time he gets to the truckstop, and drinks half a pitcher of water while sitting under the air conditioner before he's close to okay again. The waitress hovers and Dean weaves a sob story for her, driving away from this broken heart of mine, and holds open his wallet forlornly so that she can tut and sneak him a side of gravy-covered fries on the house.

He strips to the waist in the bathroom and washes up quickly, cursing the powdered soap as it rashes under his arms. Dean changes his shirt and presses down his hair with wet fingers and goes to ask his waitress where the nearest pool table is.

Pretty close, as it turns out, and when Dean walks in every head notches in his direction, a roomful of curious glances that turn indifferent almost immediately. Always walk in like you own the place, he thinks, and smiles slightly. He'd told Sam that in a parking lot once, when Sam was all jumpy and paranoid and freshly nineteen, fiddling with his shirt hem and clutching the brand-new fake ID Dean had gotten him for his birthday.

Dean orders a whiskey and doesn't let it touch the bar, orders another. As of yet, he has no way of paying.

It's an okay night and the bar's fairly well-populated, all locals. None of the men are all the way clean-shaven, and none of the women are sitting alone. There are two pool tables in the back, worn felt and chipped stout legs, two-man capsules of light under the colored glass lamps.

Dean watches from the bar for a little while, then takes his third whiskey over closer. He keeps his expression mostly blank, tinge of casual interest as his eyes flick over the angles and banks of each possible shot, the grip each player has on his cue, the folded money on the rail.

He puts an alias on the list on the blackboard once he decides he can take all these motherfuckers. With only two dollars, he can't take any dives first—it'll be a straight hustle.

It works for awhile. Winner keeps the table and Dean's two dollars becomes four then eight and then a double or nothing gets him a minted twenty dollar bill and he's on for real.

These guys, marks he picks off one after another like skeet, they're interchangeable with slabs of shoulder stretching out shirts, buckled motorcycle boots, one cheek popped out around a plug of chaw. Dean plays apologetically, not showing off and always offering the break, and the guys only get more pissed off, sneering at him from the shadows and wiping their chalk-dusty fingers hard on their jeans.

Dean has to quit buying drinks in order not to destroy his profit margin, but he gets spotted a few by his opponents, who want to see his eye falter and his hands lose their grace. It's not going to work because Dean has finished whole jars of moonshine without going blind, but he appreciates the effort.

One man keeps signing up again and again, passing a string of twenty dollar bills across the felt to Dean, and his eyes get narrower every time they play, his mouth in a small knot. Dean gets a bad feeling from him, a formerly broken nose squashed flat across the bridge, white scars like salt scatters on his knuckles, eyes cold as steel, but Dean is richer by the minute and doesn't give a shit who he takes it from. He's playing fair. He's just better than they are.

It's unassailable logic and Dean foolishly thinks it will keep him safe as he folds the thick pad of money and graciously gives up the table. Tipping an invisible cap at the scowling men with their lightened pockets, Dean allows himself the first smirk of the night, saying in a sing-song:

"Thanks for a lovely time, fellas," and that's his big mistake.

He cuts through the parking lot, eyes fixed on the white-lit gas station glowing down the dark road. One hand secured over the wad in his pocket, Dean is humming and moving swiftly, itching for the pound of the wind when the windows are down and he's going a hundred.

He's thinking about his car and he's thinking about Sam and he's not paying the requisite attention to his surroundings. Weighted footsteps behind him, crunching on the gravel and Dean doesn't hear it, replaying that one time when Sam told him, _there's no one in this world you can't con._

Someone grabs his throat from behind and slings him to the ground. Dean's cheek scrapes open on the pavement and he's wheezing, his throat on fire, fighting to get a knee under himself. His backpack tumbles beside him with a clink, and that's important, there's something about that that Dean should remember.

"Fuckin' hustler," comes a jagged disembodied voice from above, and Dean tries to shout that he's not, he didn't, not this time, but all that comes out is a croak.

His wrist is grabbed and hauled up behind his back and Dean rises to his knees at the pressure, keening as his shoulder is twisted. "Fuck," he says, his voice whistling with pain, and looks up to see Flat Nose, back for his eighty dollars and twice that taken out of Dean's hide. "Motherfucker," Dean gasps, how _unfair_, and he sounds like he's dying.

Flat Nose tightens his grip on Dean's wrist, bones crunching and squealing, and asks almost conversationally, "You know how many bones there are in your hand, cocksucker?"

"No." Dean wrenches his head back and shows an insane grin, blood on his face and teeth bared at the sky and his free hand scrambling and shoving into his backpack. "Sam would know."

And Dean sets his gun against Flat Nose's kneecap, centered like a target, looks up wide-eyed and tells him, "Let me go or never fucking walk again."

Dean tracks Flat Nose's massive form down the length of his arm and the gun barrel until he disappears into the bar, and then Dean spins, hell-bent for leather with air scraping in and out of his lungs. His arm is aching and swollen-heavy and he cradles it against his stomach, running off-balance with his mind jerking through contingency plans for when the rest of the bar catches up to him.

But whether or not Flat Nose returned with reinforcements, Dean is able to get his gas and get back to the Impala without incident. Back in the driver's seat a little past midnight, his girl purring around him, Dean can breathe again, his bruised throat opening up.

(break)

Dean could kill a poltergeist stone drunk and blindfolded, a muscle memory kind of thing, but he's distracted today and he's learned not to take that lightly.

He lies low, scrub desert town in the point of Nevada, a hundred and twelve degrees in the shade of the drive-in movie screen where Dean has the Impala parked. The place has been shut down for god knows how long, bare metal posts sticking out of the ground with the chunky metal speakers decapitated.

Dean has a Styrofoam cooler filled with ice and beers, and he keeps his hands in there, buried wrist-deep. Melting so fast and his hands are numb and it's like he's dissolving too, one piece at a time. The skin of his arms is confused with the air as hot as soup, the cold shivering up, and he's riddled with goosebumps.

Earlier, it was McDonald's and Dean was hungover, closer to asleep, shuffling and sweating in his sunglasses and thin undershirt. He ordered three egg mcmuffins and five things of hashbrowns and the cashier, wrecked martian landscape of a teenaged face under a yellow-red paper cap, gave him a put-upon look, sunken eyes rolling.

"It's one o'clock in the afternoon," the kid told him.

And Dean said out loud, "Fuck, dude, you should have told me," and the kid looked faintly surprised amidst his general discontent, dark eyebrows hunching down, but Dean was talking to Sam.

Dean was talking to Sam, who could really only qualify as his fucking invisible friend at this point, and he was doing it in public and he hadn't even _thought_ about it, and he spun, got the hell out of there.

He walked around in the unimaginable heat until he barely felt human, found a taco truck where he kept glancing at the shiny silver side, his reflection warped worse than a funhouse mirror. Nothing was going his way, his flip-flops sticking like gum to the asphalt and even his car had turned against him, blistering hot to the touch.

And his throat ached for missing Sam; it was a bad day for that. Sometimes Dean did okay and stayed on the job all day, drunk all night and woke up without remembering his dreams, but other times it was like this.

Dean decided not to go after the poltergeist just yet, retreated to the drive-in and set about getting himself methodically loaded. And so he remains, the bottles slipping between his deadened fingers and rolling through the dry red dirt.

He closes his eyes and he can see Sam that night, the night before the morning after, some stupid moment when Dean passed Sam the bottle across the gap between the beds, and Sam had grinned at him and grabbed his wrist, tipping his head back and guiding Dean to feed him a shot. Before anything else had happened, Dean remembers the circle of Sam's fingers around his wrist and his mouth against the bottle, the slow slick move of his throat as he swallowed.

Dean would like to believe that he never realized about Sam before that moment, never knew that Sam could look like that and cause this kind of domino fall, but he suspects it's bullshit. He thinks a lot about the summer of Sam's fifteenth year, when he kept getting taller and taller and his hair was always heavy with salt and hanging in his eyes. Dean remembers sparring with him and wrestling and feeling punch-drunk, skidding and slamming his hands on Sam's suddenly real body. He remembers the banked power in Sam's arms when he had Dean in a hold, and the two of them obsessed with each other in a vague simmering way, all jealousy and impatience, and sometimes he was worried about that but he didn't know why.

So. Dean thinks it wasn't entirely unprecedented.

But he does wish he'd managed to put it together earlier. If he'd figured out on his own that it wasn't just codependency, but fucked-up gay incestuous codependency, he might have dealt with it. Scoured it right out of his mind with some kind of aversion therapy, some kind of deprogramming, he could have held back from Sam and taken all the care in the world and never let on, and it probably would have gone away eventually. Dean can accomplish a lot when he sets his mind to it.

But maybe all his teachers were right and he's just not that smart, because instead it took his legs out from under him in a motel room in the Midwest. Drunk and Sam was smiling so big, goofy kid's grin that Sam almost never wears anymore. Drunk and Sam was right there with his messy hair and his half-covered eyes flickering and all at once it was like nothing was familiar about him, everything was new and Dean finally got it.

It hit him like a two-by-four, wanting to get his hands under Sam's shirt, press them flat with the fabric bunched around his wrists and he could see it, he could almost taste it. And he got wobbling to his feet, had to get away from Sam because that was crazy, it was impossible. It was the worst idea that Dean had ever had, and he couldn't get it out of his head.

From that moment forward through all the miles and months and miseries to this moment, Dean has been unable to get it out of his head.

He thinks he might have been trying to leave when he got up, stumbling for the door, but where were they (Jersey, Sam could have told him, outside Trenton) and where was he gonna go? Sam said his name and said what're you doing and came over and pulled Dean away from the door, pushed him lightly against the wall and said, what, what did Sam say?

"Did you get lost?"

There was no hope for Dean, his back hit the wall and it was over. Sam was still only joking, just fucking around but when he pushed his hair back, Dean could see his eyes and Dean could see that Sam was staring at his mouth. Dean squeezed his eyes shut and pressed back even though there was nowhere to go. This couldn't be happening to him, no way.

He said Sam's name hoarse and stricken, but he didn't think Sam was listening. Sam's hand curved over his shoulder and Dean felt him leaning in, and he turned his head quick, gasping between his teeth. Sam didn't care, kissing Dean's cheek and ducking to his throat and Dean was shaking, hands flat on the wall but that didn't last.

Dean couldn't explain it, still can't. Sam's so much smarter than he is; maybe Dean can be taken in by the worst idea of the century, but Sam's supposed to know better. Sam can't be the same type of crazy as Dean is, otherwise they're both dead.

But Sam was crazy at least that one time, mouthing Dean's jaw and telling him in a heartbreaking slur:

"Move, Dean, please," and as if he'd suddenly been freed Dean's arms were around Sam's neck and his face was hot against Sam's. He felt the grin when it broke, felt Sam's hands fall to work on his belt and Dean knotted his fingers into Sam's hair, held on.

Against the wall like that, pushing against each other fast and desperate as high schoolers, Dean kept saying his brother's name almost like a question, trying to be sure, and Sam would laugh breathlessly, yeah, yeah. Belts and flies hanging open, hips pressed flush, and Sam bit at Dean's ear, let Dean fist his hands hard in his hair and growl and say the strangest things.

Drunk and crazy and drunk some more and it was an awful thing that happened between them that night. Up against the wall with no path of escape and no real awareness in Sam's eyes, slurring and gripping Dean's hips without care, hard enough to leave bruises for the whole length of the excruciating week that followed. It wasn't at all like it should have been, because it_ shouldn't have been_.

Just that one time, maybe ten minutes all told because Dean couldn't help it and Sam was no better. Desperate was a good word, and reckless too, rubbing up against his kid brother mindless and frenzied with all that power flowing through him, the great weight of destruction gathering like a black cloud above, because Dean knew even in the moment that this was going to be the end of them.

(break)

Dean dispatches the poltergeist before lunch the next morning, drives six hundred and fifty miles north to Green River, Wyoming, and treats himself to a motel room.

After sleeping in the car for so long, Dean can't sleep stretched out. It feels too vulnerable, the bed offering him up like a sacrifice on an altar, and he draws his legs up, tucks his hands under his cheek. He's tossed the pillows onto the floor. He's left the window open to hear the enormous trucks trundling past like freight trains, smell the faint holocaustic smell of diesel.

The rumor Dean followed up here is of your garden-variety wagon-train-turned-cannibal, now haunting the Boy Scout camp on the far side of Castle Rock. It's really only a rumor of a rumor, unreliably exaggerated like a campfire story, but Dean had nowhere else to go after Searchlight. Green River at least kept him moving.

Dean hasn't been east of the Mississippi River since Sam left. Too many people in too many buildings, not enough space or sky, and those are not the real reasons.

Dean's pretty sure Sam's still back east. No real evidence to support that, other than that he feels if Sam were within a thousand miles Dean would be able to sense him.

In the morning, Dean checks his camping gear, and finds two parallel foot-long tears in the side of his tent. Rain is plainly imminent in the suffocating loom of the purple-black clouds over the mesas that sparkle with shards of lightning, so Dean asks around for a sporting goods store, steered in the proper direction.

Tents are hella expensive. Dean makes a mental note to keep the machetes on the other side of the trunk going forward, and pays with crumpled handfuls of fives and tens, he and the clerk working together to smooth them out for the drawer.

Already kinda exhausted from not sleeping well (even by his standards) and still with a five-mile hike to the Boy Scout camp to look forward to, Dean asks, "Can I use your phone?"

"Local call?"

"Oh, sure."

"'s over there." The kid points to the register at the end of the counter, and Dean hauls his tent in its giant box over.

Tapping his fingers on the cardboard in a modified drum riff, Dean counts down the rings until Sam's voicemail picks up, idly watching two blonde-haired boys play wiffle ball at the far end of the store. He probably won't even leave a message, or maybe something random and dumb like how much ramen he's gonna have to eat to pay off this new tent, but then Sam's recorded voice tells him:

"Dean, I need you to come meet me in Ohio. Outside Dayton, place called New Lebanon. I, I'm not messing around, I need some help." There's a pause and Dean's heart stops beating for exactly as long. "When you get here, I mean, if you come, just, just keep calling until I answer. I'll answer. Okay."

And it ends right there, the strident beep slicing through Dean's ear.

"Fuck," Dean says and then remembers that Sam will be able to hear this. His mouth opens and shuts a few times and the seconds slide by and his mind is clean and then it spills out of him, "Yeah, Sam, on my way, and I."

Dean stops, swallows past something thick in his throat. "I'll see you," he finishes, quickly hanging up the phone and maybe it was an impossibly lame thing to say, but it's what he's got, and then he hears it, _I'll see you_, and realizes it's actually a whole fucking lot.

Fifteen hundred miles and Dean thinks he can make it before midnight.

(break)

After having to take a rather extensive detour to shake the cop who tried to pull him over in Nebraska (said detour may also have included the tiniest bit of Kansas), Dean reaches New Lebanon at dawn.

Sleepy rockwellian suburb with neat gridded streets and American flags stuck over every garage door, unmoving and hanging limp off the thin backslashed poles. Lots of the houses have red- and green-hatted gnomes in the yard, and Dean remembers how Sammy couldn't get enough of that shit when he was five or six years old, naming each one and inventing grand gnomish backstories, lining them up like an army on the grass.

He yawns, hearing his jaw pop. Rubs at his eyes with the side of his hand and cracks his neck back and forth. He's scanning the sidewalks for Sam, the vacant lots and little parks, wondering how the hell Sam ended up here, even though Dean recognizes that this might be what Sam always meant when he was talking about a normal life. So quiet and inconsequential, and maybe Sam has gotten a job in the cramped-looking bookstore Dean passes, maybe he volunteers to umpire Little League games on Saturdays and gets his eggs, waffle, and coffee at that retro diner across the street from town hall.

Dean could definitely see it.

A Quik-Stop approaches, shining red and white and the lines coming into focus. Dean wheels in and skews across three parking spaces, unloads his pockets onto the scratched counter and gets a palmful of change for the pay phone, which is next to the arcade game in the back.

Dean messes up Sam's number the first couple of times because he was right, he can sense Sam. Somewhere in this town, less than five thousand people here and Sam's one of them. Dean wants to holler in the parking lot, convinced that Sam is within earshot.

Finally, finally he gets it right, and he's counting the rings just like always, his other hand fisted and pressed on the side of the Street Fighter machine. One ring, two, and then, oh and then:

"Dean?"

(break)

Sam directs him to a motel on the Dayton side of town, Dean's first clue that Sam hasn't settled down just yet. Or, really, his _first_ clue is Sam's voice, stilted and worn by highway dust, cracking with weariness, but Dean is stupidly happy to hear it again, he doesn't mind.

Room 13, and Dean pulls up right in front, lets the headlights wash across the curtained window and the door with the 3 hanging crooked. He pictures Sam inside, looking over as a frame of light comes glowing to life around the window, unfolding himself from off the bed and padding over to the door.

Dean gets out and walks up, stands before the door with his hands in his pockets, just breathing. He glances sideways at the window to see if Sam is peeking, but no. Dean kicks the door, not trusting his hands.

Too fast for him to be standing anywhere but directly on the other side (eye wedged on the glass, no doubt), Sam jerks the door open.

They stare at each other for a long time.

Sam has lost weight that he can in no way spare, collarbones hard and visible through his T-shirt and his cheeks gone slightly hollow. There are brownish contusions under his eyes that fire concern and rage through Dean, thinking Sam's been brawling and getting beat, but then Sam blinks and Dean realizes they're just insomniac rings, a pair to match Dean's own. He looks shocked and unsteady and deeply afraid, some kind of stony Sam thing happening underneath, something glittering in his eyes as he looks at Dean.

He has one hand on the door, the other on the jamb, and he fills the frame, completes the picture and Dean almost tackles him to the floor with a hug but instead hears himself saying roughly:

"Not only do they have a Room 13, you actually let them put you in Room 13?"

Sam blinks again, his mouth slightly open and Dean has to jerk his eyes back up as Sam says, "What?" Sam's brow furrows, and he looks back at the door, his eyebrows going up. "Oh. Huh." He shrugs, gives Dean an uncertain look. "You look like shit."

"Let me in, I'll look a little better."

Sam steps back automatically, and Dean's stomach clenches, biting the inside of his cheek. Sam runs a hand through his lank hair nervously, and maybe tries to smile but it doesn't take. His stuff is spread out enough that Dean knows he's been here for a little while. Dean sees Sam's dirty shoes and the lame stickers on his laptop and the carved handle of his sickle sticking out of his bag, and finds that he's missed those things something awful, the comforting detritus of Sam's day-to-day existence.

Dean looks back and Sam has his back to the closed door, his arms crossed on his chest. He's chewing his lip, watching Dean.

"You're okay?" Sam asks.

Dean nods. "You?"

Sam shrugs again, but says, "Yeah."

They fall into a terrible silence. Sam shouldn't be standing against the door like that, it's doing bad things to Dean's head. Sam's jeans sag loose on his hips and Dean imagines his hands there for a second, locking Sam into his palms, holding him down. His throat goes dry and he licks his lips, hating that his legs are shaking.

"You rang?" Dean manages. Sam twitches, his chin jerking.

"Yeah."

Dean waits, but Sam doesn't add anything, his face pinched. "You said you needed help."

Nodding, Sam pushes off the door and paces over to the bedside table, picking up an unfamiliar book with a plain black cover and spine. "Yeah. Here."

Sam leafs a little ways into the book and Dean sees that it's a blank journal, the first dozen pages scribbled over with Sam's handwriting. He finds the page he wants and turns the book towards Dean, offering it to him.

Dean crosses to him, weirdly spooked and he doesn't want to take the journal but Sam's holding it out and begging him with his eyes.

A fire demon, an ifrit, and Sam has written its true name is painstaking Arabic, the phonetic pronunciation spelled out underneath. It's going after kids, burning them alive in their beds, and Sam's handwriting does not falter as he lists the innocent dead, the five year old in a racecar bed, the seven year old with Star Wars sheets.

Dean is confused, badly knocked off-balance. He pages through the earlier part of the book and sees more cases, a werewolf, a woman in white, a nest of vampires, marching backwards in time through the four months they've been apart.

He looks up, his eyebrows hunched down. "What the fuck is this?"

"It. It's an ifrit, Dean, didn't you-"

"No, Sam, what the fuck is this book?" Dean chucks it at him and Sam catches it, baffled, curling his huge hands around it protectively.

"What do you mean?" Sam asks, kinda desperate but a little more angry. "A case journal, it's my case journal."

"You're hunting." That was supposed to come out as a question, but not so much. "You've been hunting this whole time?"

Sam looks down at the book in his hands, looks back up at Dean with his killer eyes flashing. "Of course I've been hunting. Haven't you?"

"Of course, but that's, that's me, that's totally expected."

"What, you're good enough to go it alone but I'm not?"

"Don't fucking pick a fight with me, Sammy," Dean warns him, and Sam laughs out loud.

"Okay, we'll just carry on with the fight you picked."

Dean glares at him. He's not picking fights. It's kind of a crucial piece of information that Dean didn't have, Sam taking on the underworld all by his lonesome. It jars Dean because what if something had happened, what if Dean tried to call Sam's voicemail some night and the number was disconnected, his brother just that easily eradicated from the world. Dean might never have known how it happened, chasing myth and heresy, straining to find meaning in the static at the end of the line.

"I didn't know you were, that's all," Dean says, forcibly calming himself. Sam's hell on his better intentions.

"What'd you think I was doing?" Sam sounds genuinely curious, his shoulders still tense.

Dean shrugs. "I dunno. Real job somewhere, I guess. Place of your own. Maybe even a car."

"I have a car, Dean."

"Well, good." He sits down heavily on the edge of the bed, suddenly tired beyond expression. "Not that you'd know what to do with it."

He stares at the carpet between his feet. He'd really thought that Sam had been glad to get out of this life, that he'd gone and made something of himself. And maybe sometimes Dean thought it was worth it to ruin things forever the way they did, because at least it got Sam out guilt-free. No one would have expected him to stay after recognizing the kind of man Dean turned out to be, and at least now Sam would be safe.

But hunting obviously isn't any part of why Sam left.

"Dean," Sam says softly, and Dean's head snaps up. Their eyes meet with a crack and then Sam's dart away hastily, his throat ducking. "Thank you for coming."

Something snags in Dean's chest, and he makes a strange quiet noise, a sad kinda sigh. He wants to get up and go over to Sam, put his hand on the back of Sam's neck and pull him down until his mouth is on Dean's and Dean will be able to breathe then, he's sure of it.

He looks away. "It's not a problem."

Silence falls again, and Dean thinks that this would be the moment to bring it up, for Sam to say, "and about that other thing," blushing hot-red and staring at his feet, telling Dean haltingly that it's too weird and it can't happen again, both things that he has told Dean before.

But instead he says, "You can get some sleep, if you want. I can, I'll finish up some of this research stuff and fill you in later and then we can go tonight."

Sam's talking fast, anxious, and Dean nods along, watching Sam's hands flit and stammer in the air. Dean thinks he should volunteer to sleep in his car, just to let Sam have a little peace of mind, and the very idea of it makes him want to curl up into a ball and cry, but then Sam says:

"I can just move this stuff-" and he's grabbing his laptop and some papers from off the bed, clearing a place for Dean.

Dean stares at Sam's hair falling across his face as he leans down near where Dean is sitting, the clean line of his jaw and his lower lip looking bitten and perfect, his long neck and Dean clutches his leg as tightly as he can, determinedly not remembering the warm give of Sam's throat under his mouth.

Sam backs off, dumps his junk on the little table and takes the single chair, blinking down at his book with distant incomprehension. Dean realizes he's gazing all moonstruck and shit, and yanks his boots off, irritated with himself. Dean lies down and rolls over on his side, his back to Sam, and closes his eyes.

Sam needs help on a case. That's why he left that message for Dean, why Dean came flying across the Midwest without thought to possible jail time. Sam hasn't found life to be a pale and friendless trudge without Dean, hasn't grown to regret the admittedly true things he said on the morning after, and he hasn't brought Dean here to offer him anything.

Sam had told him, "You're my brother and I love you but I can't," and left.

Dean lets that play in his head over and over again until he drifts off, trying to engrave it on his mind like a law carved in stone.

(break)

The dream is different this time.

This time they're in a motel room and the walls are on fire. It's Sam's fault; every time he touches something it goes up in flames.

Dean can hear his hair crackling and he jerks his head, watching the sparks fly. Sam's close enough that Dean can see the firework reflection in his eyes. He flattens his hand next to Dean's head and an outline of fire flares around his fingers.

"You gotta stop," Dean says, barely able to breathe. These motel rooms are as flimsy as cardboard; if one part burns the whole thing will go.

And Sam's laughing and shaking his head, licking at Dean's throat and it's hotter than fire could ever hope to be.

"I was made for this," Sam tells him. "So were you."

Dean's eyes are raw and torn and wet but it might be blood. His shirt is smoldering and growing holes like black-edged tumors that Sam follows with his fingers, smearing soot on the bare skin of Dean's stomach. Stuff that won't wash away, like the blisters Sam's mouth is leaving on Dean, the mad incendiary glee in his eyes.

"You weren't," Dean says, insistent with his hands pressing on Sam's shoulders. The ceiling has caught, charred plaster crumbling and raining around them. "It was never supposed to be like this."

"What you wanted," Sam says, sneaky Cheshire grin that Dean wants to bite away. "What you always wanted and me too."

"No." Dean shakes his head and ignores the way his whole being is crying out for his brother. "That's not a good enough reason."

"Reason?" Sam laughs and his smile is white and joyful. "You don't want a _reason_."

Dean doesn't know what to say to that, doesn't really know what Sam means and anyway, the room is disintegrating around them. Ashes stick like snowflakes to Sam's eyelashes and his hands are smoothing down Dean's hair, snuffing the trickles of flame crawling along his shoulders. Sam is trembling like a car pushed too hard, and Dean can see patches of sky now, indigo and smudged with pale smoke.

"See?" Sam says, resting his forehead against Dean's briefly. "You thought it was gone forever but I'd never do that to you."

Dean nods. He has no idea what Sam's talking about and he doesn't care. He thinks they might both be on fire, but he's really not sure.

Sam places two fingers under Dean's chin and lifts his face and Dean's heart clutches, Sam's breath warm on his mouth and his easy smile parting, exhaling the sound of Dean's name and then Dean wakes up.

"No," he moans automatically, digging his face into the pillow. One more second, that's all he needed, and the loss of it is crippling.

"Dean?" Sam asks too close, his hand closing suddenly on Dean's shoulder, and Dean wrenches away in shock, sucking in a breath between his teeth. Sam's hand stutters against his back and then retreats, and he says, "I'm sorry, I thought," and then cuts himself off and Dean feels the bed giving up his weight.

He takes a minute to pull himself together and wake up more fully, whitewash his mind of the fire dream and all thought of Sam's hands, and then he carefully rolls over. Sam is standing over the little table, hands in his pockets and a miserable expression on his face.

"Hi," Dean says, trying out his voice and mostly recognizing it.

Sam attempts a smile that looks like he's got a gun to his head. "Afternoon."

"Time's it?"

"One."

"Shit." Dean levers up, swinging his legs off the bed and taking his head in his hands. "You shouldn't have let me sleep so long."

"Yeah, well. You looked like you needed it."

Dean glances back over his shoulder and finds Sam staring at him, strangely fixated as if hypnotized, but when Dean meets his eyes Sam sorta shrugs and smirks, looking away. Sam stands like he's too tired to keep his shoulders up, slouching and hiding his height like he hasn't done since he was sixteen and kept tripping on everything.

Dean gets up, his stomach aching and his head blood-rushing. He grabs his bag and gestures indistinctly at the bathroom, telling Sam, "Just gonna," and sees Sam nod. Dean ducks in and it feels like he's taking cover and it's the weirdest thing to think, Sam like a threat, an enemy.

Dean takes his time washing up and changing his shorts and T-shirt, trying to get his head on straight. His face in the mirror looks hollow, a week unshaven and rough, eyes sunk down like bullet holes. Dean wonders what Sam sees when he looks at him. If Dean is the picture behind Sam's eyelids like Sam is Dean's.

The water's pounding hot and steam is rising. Fog eats away at the mirror and if Dean stands here long enough he'll be able to watch his features blur and disappear. It kinda sounds like fun, but there are more important things to worry about.

Sam is seated at the table when Dean comes out, his head snagging up as if involuntarily. He tries that bad smile again and Dean can't hide his wince. Sam thankfully lets it drop, his face tense and sad again but at least his own.

"So what's the problem?" Dean asks, sitting on the edge of the bed because there isn't another chair. "You know all about ifrits, you've banished like a dozen."

Sam looks faintly relieved, one big hand spread out on his opened journal. "Somebody's summoning it. I _have_ banished it. Three times. Somebody's bringing it back."

"Really? That's a neat trick."

Sam's eyes get thin and hard. "The body count is up to four. None of them over ten years old."

Dean flinches. "Okay, 'neat' wasn't the best word."

"Not really, no. Here." Sam passes Dean a handful of newspaper clippings and Dean shuffles through them, grainy freckled faces, little boys with missing teeth and little girls in braids, spit-shined and dressed in nice clothes, each posed the same way because each is a school picture. They're difficult to look at because none of the children will ever take another.

"I've been looking for a pattern, figure out who would want to hurt these kids in particular, but none of them even knew each other. Four kids in two different schools, all different classes. They don't share a sports team or a babysitter or a fucking pediatrician, _nothing_."

Dean looks up from the clippings, sees Sam tear a frustrated hand through his hair. "How long have you been on this job?"

"Three weeks. I didn't pick it up until Jake and Chrissy were already dead. And I thought I had it, I was sure."

Sam stops and stares down at the table for a minute. Dean watches him drop his hands to his lap and squeeze one fist into another, knuckles popping.

"I banished it," Sam says tonelessly. "Thought I did. And I left, I, I thought it was gone so I left. I got to Kentucky before I heard about Taylor McCormack. The mortician's assistant told me that the fire fused her retainer to her palate and they had to bury her like that."

"Jesus, Sam."

Sam shudders, curling into his shoulders. "I know. It's all kinds of fucked up."

The shell-like curve of Sam's back and his bowed head draw Dean's eyes, his stomach sinking and twisting. Sam holds himself differently, cautious and defensive, and Dean doesn't know if that's because of what happened or just how Sam operates when he's on his own. Dean doesn't like it. It makes Sam seem scared, which Dean is pretty sure Sam is not.

"Well," Dean says a little too loud, wishing Sam would look at him again. "I'm here now. So things are obviously looking up."

Sam snorts quietly. "Obviously."

"C'mon, Sammy." Dean gets up and risks a quick smack on Sam's shoulder, feeling Sam's body jerk under his hand for a split second. "Show me this so-called car of yours."

That's how to play it, Dean decides, like nothing ever happened. He checks his gun and tucks it in his belt at the small of his back. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Sam folding newspaper clippings carefully back into his journal, and Dean bites the inside of his cheek, counting down from ten.

Something is plainly wrong with Sam, and Dean did that. Dean fucked him up and then let him leave and now, four months on, he shouldn't be surprised to find a shambling mess where he left his brother. He shouldn't be so shaken by the sight of Sam all uncertain and pissed-off and helpless. Dean can fix this. Pretend it never happened and pretend that he never thinks about it, and maybe someday Sam will actually believe him. Maybe somewhere far down the line, Dean will be able to give Sam back his brother.

(break)

continued in ch 2


	2. Chapter 2

Sam's car causes Dean pain.

"Ow," he says when they're standing in front of it. He squints and it doesn't get any prettier. "Gross."

Sam kicks at him wearily, his heart not in it. "Shut up."

It's some cramped Japanese thing the color of bruised dirt, the kind of car a civil servant drives, somebody who doesn't even know how to change the oil. A dent the size of a watermelon adds depth to the driver's side door, one of the windshield wipers gone missing, the floor on the shotgun side carpeted with coffee cups and Red Bull cans and Payday wrappers. A college kid's car, really.

"You paid money for this?" Dean asks, fearing that if Sam says yes, he'll never be able to respect him again.

But Sam shakes his head. "It was haunted and I cleansed it but then the dude it belonged to was too freaked out and he made me take it as a thank you."

"You're driving a haunted car."

"Are you deaf? It's clean."

Dean swipes his finger across the side panel, leaving a path in the dust. "It is in no way _clean_."

Sam rolls his eyes and gets in, leaning across to unlock Dean's side because apparently power locks are too much to hope for. Dean settles gingerly, eyeing the No Smoking sticker on the dashboard, the ace of spades hung on a chain around the rearview mirror. His feet crunch in the mess on the floor.

"This is just awesome," Dean says. "Definitely better than taking my car."

Sam scowls at the road, taking up too much space in this little piece of shit car, out of place here just as bad as Dean.

"Can we focus on the matter at hand, please?" Sam drums his fingers on the steering wheel. Dean notices that he's started biting his nails again, an old nervous habit that left for California when Sam did.

"Sure."

"Okay. I've been looking into the town's history, 'cause maybe the pattern is all the kids are from here. I haven't found anything that might explain it, though. Obviously there were natives who got wiped out two hundred years ago, but that's the same as, you know, everywhere. It seems very specifically targeted to the town, but there's no record of witch hunts or famous lynch mobs or massacres or anything."

Dean slouches against the door, free to watch Sam because Sam is usually good about keeping his eyes on the road. Sam is easier like this, when he knows what to say and has evidence to back it all up. Dean could listen to him talk for days, turn Sam into the background soundtrack of his life.

"So I'm stumped, basically," Sam concludes, and sighs. "Your thoughts?"

Dean moves his shoulders in half a shrug, eyes narrow and content tracking over the lines of Sam's wrists, his smooth arms.

"I don't know," Dean says absently. "I've heard of people summoning fire demons but it's all old stories. I didn't think it could still be done."

"Yeah. There have only been about five documented cases like this since World War II, all over the world. And in none of them was the demon under the kind of pinpoint control this one's under. The fires are restricted to the beds, the curtains don't burn, the walls aren't even scorched. It would take a necromancer twenty years to get that good."

"Are we." Dean stops, glancing at Sam's face. "Do you have any idea how much time before the next one?"

The muscle in Sam's jaw twitches. "Not much. Couple days, week maybe."

"And, what, what do the cops think? How come this town isn't going batshit?"

Dean gestures at the sunny mid-afternoon sidewalks, kids in shimmery AYSO soccer uniforms eating ice cream on the curb while their parents sipped coffee and read the newspaper. Shiny happy people, he thinks, trying to recall the melody but no luck.

"They think they're dealing with a serial killer using a homemade blowtorch or something. I only got that much from talking to the parents. They haven't released details to the press, so all the townsfolk know is that four kids have died over the past two months and the circumstances surrounding their deaths are still being investigated. The town's pretty freaked out, as you'll see, but holding it together. Not panicked yet, but if the FBI gets involved that'll change quick."

"The fucking feds are coming?" Dean hates the fucking feds.

"Maybe. One more kid, and my money's on it. So we save the kid, we stay ahead of the g-men."

"And then drive off into the sunset in your crapmobile."

Sam laughs, an awkward snort of a laugh that catches them both by surprise, and Sam sounds so dumb that a grin breaks on Dean's face. Sam flushes and darts a look at Dean and he coughs, covering his mouth with the back of his hand. There's something crooked and dark in Sam's eyes, tugging at Dean from the inside.

"Anyway," Sam says, slightly composed. "There's some stuff at the library that you should take a look at."

"Food, though, Sam. Food first, right?"

"Oh. Sure, yeah." Sam's forehead lines. "Sorry, I didn't think. You haven't eaten."

"It's okay," Dean says, a little taken aback by how Sam's face has twisted. "Any kinda cheeseburger will do."

Sam nods and finds a old-fashioned hamburger stand within a few blocks. He gets out of the car without saying anything, and Dean watches him walk over and stand with his hands in his pockets, reading the big menu over the window.

That crack about driving off into the sunset, Dean didn't mean anything by it. He knows he and Sam won't be leaving this town in the same car. Whichever direction Sam goes, Dean will go the opposite, the two of them racing for mirrored horizons. Dean wonders if Sam is worried about that, worried Dean will stick around or not let Sam leave again.

Dean would never do that, of course. He may have an unnatural fixation on his brother and it may be destroying his life, but Sam told him no and that's all Sam ever had to say.

They eat their burgers on the hood of the car, hard sunlight bouncing off windshields and absorbed by the wet-black asphalt. Dean people-watches and sees what Sam means by the town being freaked out: no kids are out alone, their hands swallowed up in the hands of adults, and everyone's eyes are thin from more than the brightness. A harried dad passes juggling a double-armful of groceries and saying to his son in a strained voice, "Walk in front, Joshua, stay where I can see you and don't pick that up, that's trash."

Dean offers a few attempts at conversation, but Sam turns each down with a short answer, and so they eat in silence. Dean tries to think about the job but his mind wanders and he's thinking about Sam's big hands, the brush of ketchup on the side of his mouth. There's a low ache in Dean's stomach, a sad and constant want. He'd give just about anything to be allowed to fuck his brother.

At the library, Sam shows Dean the original newspaper articles of each of the murders, hoping that Dean might spot something he missed. Dean is doubtful; Sam has always been the brains of the operation.

But after he's been through each several times, he stops at one photograph of a mother and father weeping into each other's shoulders, and in the background, hovering beyond the police tape, an itchingly familiar face.

Dean points at it, a goateed face in the crowd, asks Sam, "Who's that? How come he's familiar to me?"

Sam leans in, squints. "Because that, that's Ted Mason." He flips the microfiche machine ahead a few weeks to the article about the next killing, and there's the man with the goatee again, now on the front steps with his wife, sitting as if they'd collapsed amid a forest of policeman legs, both of them shell-shocked with dangling useless hands. "Donnie Mason's dad, he was the fourth one."

"Why was he in the crowd for this one then?" Dean points back at the first article, the second child killed. "Do they live in the same neighborhood?"

"No. Maybe he was friends with the parents and came over when he heard? Wait, do a search for me."

Dean happens to be sitting in front of a computer with access to the internet, and he obediently brings up Google, types in Sam's "Ted Mason" and "Jeff Esposito," both of them fathers of victims.

Sam hunches over Dean's shoulder, close and intent on the monitor. "There. Is that-"

"Yep. High school classmates. Graduated twenty years ago."

"Fuck. Did Roger Dauvois graduate with them?"

"Um. Yeah."

"_Fuck_."

Sam forgets they're in a library and draws a glare over horned-rim glasses from the circulation desk. He grabs on to the edge of the table and he's forgotten other stuff too, because his knee is pressed against Dean's now and he doesn't seem to care. The look on his face is disbelief and horror, this massive black wave about to crash down.

Dean kinda doesn't want to ask but he knows he has to. "Sam, didn't you-"

"No." Wood creaks under Sam's grip. "I looked at them individually, just for priors, but I never, I didn't check them against each other. I've been focused on the kids, why the _kids_, I didn't think."

"It could be a coincidence," Dean offers even though he doesn't really believe it. "It's a small town."

Sam glances at his notes, throws out half-heartedly, "Max McCormack."

Dean tries it, and says surprised and grateful, "No! Max McCormack went to high school in Akron." He sits back, relieved. "Well, there you go."

Sam gives him a second, then mentions drily, "His wife's maiden name is Schiff. Tracy Schiff."

"Oh." Dean types it in slowly. "Oh. Yeah. She did graduate with those other guys."

"_Fuck_." Mindful of his voice now, Sam hisses it, sounding sinister. "There's a fucking connection for you. Parents of all four were in the same class. They were friends or, what, the whole _class_ is cursed? That's gotta be hundreds of little kids by now, I cannot fucking _believe_ I missed that."

"We found it now, it's okay-"

"It is _not_ okay, that's the break I've been dying for and it's _incredibly obvious_."

"Okay," and Dean hauls Sam out of his seat before the librarian can make her way over to kick them out herself. He gets Sam outside and releases him on the lawn, in the flickering shadows of the trees. "Pitch your fit, go ahead."

Dean acknowledges that it's somewhat of a dick thing to say, but he doesn't think it quite warranted Sam shoving him that hard in the chest.

"Shut up, Dean, you know how big a screw-up this is." Sam looks frantic, his hair snarled from all the nervous running of his hands. His red-rimmed eyes are huge and dry. "Has it been like this for you too?"

Wary, Dean rubs his chest. "How do you mean?"

"It's just that, I, I've been fucking up. The job. It's much harder."

Dean shakes his head without thinking. "Just because we were doing it together. And you've never done it alone."

"I anticipated the physical but it's like half my brain's gone too." Sam gives him a hesitant look, half-spooked and killing Dean with his fucking eyes. "You've done it alone before. Is this worse?"

Dean opens his mouth to say that it's different, it's complicated, but hears instead, "Yes."

"You make stupid mistakes. You get yourself in trouble."

Dean nods, thinking about the time every bone in his hand was almost broken in a bar's parking lot and the time he let himself get pinned down by a creature that ate skin, the glittering edge of sleep deprivation over everything and all the times he spoke out loud and expected an answer. Sam mirrors the nod at him, touches his own chest. Sam looks freaked out and relieved and so tired, he looks impossibly good to Dean.

Taking an unconscious step closer, Dean says, "Our timing's off. It's natural. Gotta adapt, that's all."

Sam shakes his head, his gaze locked on Dean's. "It's been four months."

"I know how long it's been."

"And have you _adapted_?" Sam asks with a pretty sneer. "Are you okay without me?"

"Dear God, no."

That shuts Sam's mouth, at least. He blinks at Dean and for a second the anger cleans off his face and he looks about fifteen years old and absolutely finished, about to pass out on his feet. Dean wants to put his hands on Sam's hips and hold him up. Sling Sam's arm around his shoulder and take all of his weight. Dean remembers, suddenly and starkly, falling asleep on couches when he was eight or nine and waking up with a Sammy blanket, the simple weight of a chest breathing flatly against his own.

Dean smiles, watching Sam's face fall.

"I do the dumbest stuff, Sam, you should see. You'd laugh." Dean pushes at his sleeves, wishing he had scars to show. "I've learned to work around it. It's only ever near misses. What did you expect?"

Color rising on his cheeks, Sam looks away, pressing his lips together. "I never expected any of this."

"Well. Join the club."

"It's not trivial. I might have saved two of those kids if I had. If." Sam trails off, his brow heavily lined and his mouth pinched like he's biting the inside of his lip.

Dean is finding it tough to look at Sam, tough to swallow past the thickness in his throat. Sam keeps running up against the wall of what happened four months ago, forgetting it briefly in the investigative rush of the case and his vicious self-abasement, and Dean has the pleasure of watching him remember again and again, that terrible black thing shuttering across his eyes.

"Look, don't," Dean says, and can't think of what comes next. Lost, he reaches for Sam's shoulder and takes hold, his grip sure. "Let's just worry about whoever's next, okay? It could be hundreds of kids, like you said."

Sam tenses when Dean's hand closes on his shoulder, but he's solid and doesn't move away. Dean is embarrassed by how relieved he is to have a hand on Sam once again, like the only rail before a hundred story drop.

Sam breathes out carefully, closing his eyes and forcibly clearing his expression. When he looks at Dean again, he's more straightforward and easier to face, and Dean lets his hand drop.

"Yeah." Sam rubs at his face discontentedly. "I'm so ready to be done with this case, you have no idea."

Dean gets to the library door first and holds it open for Sam without quite recognizing what he's doing. "Don't worry, Sammy," he says even though he knows it won't help. "This is what we do."

(break)

In a twenty year old high school yearbook, Sam and Dean find the common thread between the parents of the dead children. It's not convoluted or obscure. There's a black-and-white photo for each school club, and Ted Mason, Jeff Esposito, Roger Dauvois, and Tracy Schiff are all grinning out of the same shot, a lifetime younger and framed by trees, holding rifles cocked on their shoulders.

"A school-sponsored hunting club?" Sam asks. "Really?"

"Never underestimate the sticks," Dean tells him, writing down the names of the other kids in the club. "Or the allure of a good firearm."

"It's like a bad joke," Sam complains, still upset about the turns the case has taken. "Let's arm the disaffected suburban kids!"

"Oh, give me a break. You know the more weapons training people receive the less stupid shit they pull."

"Apparently not these people. Considering they've brought down hellfire on the next generation."

Dean sits back and gives Sam a look. "Getting kinda biblical there, aren't you?"

"It's kinda appropriate." Sam slams the yearbook closed, ruffling the loose papers on the table, but it's just for drama's sake and a second later he opens it from the front again. He taps his fingers on one of the first pages. "And I'd like this explained, too."

Dean looks over and sees a picture of a little girl, maybe nine years old with her lank hair combed straight and a big wedge of a gap-toothed grin on her face. The girl is Patricia Kelly, and the yearbook is dedicated to her in memoriam.

"Why is the high school yearbook dedicated to a girl who died if she wasn't a student?"

"Maybe she was a younger sister? A teacher's daughter?" Dean suggests, but he doubts it and he can tell Sam does too.

"Look her up."

Dean does. Sam's close over his shoulder again, unthinking, and every few seconds Dean can feel him shift, a hyperawareness that causes Dean's fingers stumble on the keys, inverting letters a few times before he gets it right. If Sam notices, he doesn't say anything.

In the microfiche, Dean finds the same photo of Patricia Kelly in the yearbook on the front page of the local newspaper twenty years ago, under the black-and-white headline: "Young Girl Killed in Hunting Accident."

"Well, hell," Dean says. He sits back and bumps into Sam and jerks forward awkwardly, hunching over the computer. He doesn't dare glance back. "There you go," he finishes weakly.

Sam's quiet for a second, and Dean tries to imagine his face, finely lined and sad-eyed and intent.

"They shot her?" Sam asks eventually. Dean shakes his head automatically, even though what Sam said is incontrovertibly true.

"It was an accident. The hunting club was supposed to stay in a specific part of the forest but they wandered out onto land owned by Dennis Kelly, that's Patricia's dad, and she was playing out there, I guess."

"And they, they somehow mistook her for a _deer_?" Sam says, his voice rising and Dean pushes his elbow back into Sam's stomach by instinct, knowing what thin ice they're on with the librarian. Sam is as solid as a wall and warm and he breathes in sharply under Dean's arm.

"Look," Dean says in a pointed whisper. "It says nobody really knows what happened. None of them saw her until they found her body. There were eight of them out there; it could have been any one of them who actually fired the shot."

"They didn't run ballistics on the bullet?"

Dean scrolls through a series of articles about the aftermath. Half the kids in the gun club are mentioned by name, the other half described anonymously as juveniles. All of them, it's evident, were completely horrified by what had happened, stammering and damnably young every time they were quoted begging for forgiveness. The shooting had rocked the little town to its core. People put up Patricia Kelly's picture in store windows and left flowers and cards on the playground at the elementary school, all the flags flown at half-mast for a month.

"Something about the guns. They weren't using their own, somebody had loaned them out and they got mixed up in the truck? It sounds like it was a collective panic attack after they realized what they'd done."

"So all eight faced charges?"

"All eight pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and received suspended sentences and a shit ton of community service." Dean pauses. "They were minors, Sam. At least the ones we already knew about. That's why you didn't see it when you looked for priors. The records were sealed."

He risks a glance over and sees Sam shaking his head with his eyes and mouth tense and small, not giving himself an inch.

"Don't," Sam says shortly. He stares at the screen like instructions for absolution are written in the white space between the lines. "What are the names of the others? We need to figure out how many of them have kids."

Dean reads him the ones that were printed in the newspaper and they fill in the eighth name, another minor, by doing a process of elimination on the club roster in the yearbook. Dean wishes that there were dozens of other rote tasks to do, mindless chattering stuff that wouldn't leave Sam time to dwell. Sam dwells like a champ.

"All right," Dean says once they have their list of imminent victims. "That's what they did. There's your why. Now time for the punchline."

Sam nods. "Who's exacting revenge for Patricia Kelly?"

Dean leans back, crossing his arms over his chest and looking over at Sam. "How long did you say it would take a necromancer to get that kind of control over a fire demon?"

"'Bout twenty years." Sam's eyes catch Dean's and the corner of his mouth curls up. For a second it's just like old times.

"Well," Dean says. "Maybe we go pay Dennis Kelly a visit."

"Hell yeah we do."

Sam stands up, and Dean grabs his wrist, trying not to notice the way it makes Sam freeze immediately.

"Just one thing, baby brother," trying to make it sound like it used to but it's sour and doesn't fit his mouth, so Dean tries out an old devil-may-care grin that hangs on his face like a crooked sign. "We're taking my car."

(break)

They go back to the motel to get the Impala and Sam doesn't say anything until they pull into the parking lot and he announces abruptly that he's gonna take a shower.

Dean is taken off-guard but he plays it off and nods like it's perfectly normal. It looks like it's been a few days, Sam's hair crazier than normal the way it gets when he hasn't washed it in awhile, the dark rough on Sam's face that Dean isn't thinking about too much. Sam's always got a secondary motive, though, and Dean figures this one is metaphorical. Sam's hallucinating blood on his hands again.

Dean finds an apple in the pocket of Sam's bag where he usually keeps one, and he sits on the edge of the bed, carving it into moon-shaped pieces with his switch. He flips through the nine channels on the television, pressing the buttons with his knuckles to keep it from getting sticky, listening to the spastic sound of the spray.

Trying hard as he can not to let his mind go anywhere untoward, Dean ends up thinking about the case again, but that's loaded too, because it's hard to ignore the fact that Sam's been out here for three weeks slamming himself bloody on the walls, and it took them all of an afternoon once they were together again.

It just really isn't that tough of a case. Perversely, this now scares the fuck out of Dean, wondering with a kind of nascent panic what has happened to his very smart brother. Sam walked out on Dean because he's smart, way smarter than Dean who can only want the impossible. Sam gets defensive but Dean has never had any doubts that if Sam wanted to go it alone in the manner of most hunters, he would quickly be the best at that like anything else he's ever tried. The kid lived out of a car for half of high school and landed a scholarship to Stanford. Dean never underestimates him.

But this, this is something entirely new. Dean has gone to his strengths and basically laid off cases that require solving; he stalks known monsters and walks into hauntings with only the local bar legend to work off, but he's always trusted his instincts in a fight way more than in any kind of academic situation. It figures that Sam's the opposite and as impaired as Dean has been physically (and he has, hasn't he, lucky to be alive sometimes because he's millimeters slower and so endlessly distracted, caught with a wall at his back all too often), so Sam must find himself when trying to put clues together.

Dean doesn't like the idea of it. If he'd known Sam was still hunting, he would have worried about injury and death strictly by biological imperative—they are the last of the line, after all—but this is far more insidious. If Sam can't solve cases, people are gonna die and Sam's gonna think it's his fault.

That's a whole different story. A brand-new level of hell.

The shower cuts off and Dean jumps, then sighs at himself.

He finishes his apple and tosses the core, leaves the television on a re-run of MASH, poking at some of their notes from the library. He thinks, fleetingly, that if Sam stays like this he might not actually be able to let him leave again, but immediately forces it away.

Sam comes out wearing his boxers and Dean is staring at the papers on the bed, hearing Radar call "Choppers," and listening to the quiet rustle of Sam getting dressed. Steam rolls out of the bathroom and the scent of Sam's cheap shampoo comes with it and tightens every inch of Dean's skin. He can feel the heat on his face and knows what that must look like but what can he do about it.

"Some stuff makes more sense now," Sam says, subdued and neutral.

Dean glances over and it's a bad idea because Sam's got jeans on but no shirt. Dean's brain kinda short-circuits for a second, everything forgotten because Sam's shoulders are still huge even though you can see his ribs a little bit, hard pale skin of his stomach and Dean's staring and Sam's staring back and Dean jerks his eyes away with a bit-off gasp.

A moment passes. Dean clears his throat.

"What sorta stuff?" he asks eventually. Sam is frozen in the corner of his eye, blurry and tall with a red shirt hanging in his hand.

Another taut moment and the tension is corrosive, eating away at Dean. He wants to look over at Sam again but he knows he can't. Everything would show and Sam would see all the wicked things that Dean wants to do to him, see that the sickness in Dean is incurable.

"Jeff Esposito," Sam says. "I went over there the day after his daughter died. They had him sedated, and he kept muttering about penance."

"Penance?"

"I tried to ask for what, but then the cops rushed me out of there." Sam makes a rough impatient sound. "Those fucking cops. I knew they weren't telling me shit."

"What was your cover?"

"Reporter. It wasn't working too well."

Dean nods, thinking that's probably another part of it, they must lie better as a team. It occurs to him with the blare of the obvious that they probably do pretty much everything better as a team. He angles a look at Sam and Sam is wearing the red shirt, slumped in the chair with his hair curling wet and dark. His eyes are unfocused, far away.

"And Donnie Mason's mom, Cynthia. Just a couple days after Donnie, she was already talking about divorce, saying all this terrible stuff and blaming Ted, and he just. He just sat there. Let her say whatever she wanted, and he didn't even flinch. With this look on his face, like, like." Sam stops, exhales. "I thought it was just the shock."

"You couldn't know, Sam," Dean tries.

"Bullshit."

Dean shuts up then. He's not doing anyone any good.

Sam creaks and thumps around getting his socks and shoes on, and Dean feels unbelievably stupid sitting here doing nothing except avoid looking at Sam, so he takes out his gun and sees if he can break it all the way down and back before Sam's ready to go. Swift and easy, black prints of grease on his fingers, Dean lives for the moment when something clicks into place, the sure and uncomplicated fit just as it was meant to be.

The sun is going down when they come out, bleeding and deeply orange, and Dean's heart just wrenches in his chest when he sees the flutter of Sam's hand over the dashboard of the Impala, the slight hesitant caress like he's not sure he's still allowed.

Dean gets them on the road, the setting sun centered in the windshield and absolutely blinding. Sam doesn't put down his visor, slumping in the seat with his eyes closed, letting the thick gold light blast him. With his damp hair and his wrinkled clothes and the worn look on his face, Sam looks like he's underwater, some distant sun-made sea.

Dean tries to keep his eyes on the road. He wonders what kind of calamity it would be if he just reached over and put his hand on Sam's leg.

"I missed this car," Sam says softly.

Dean looks over before he can stop himself, but Sam's eyes are still closed. "Yeah?"

"That piece of shit I'm driving starts shaking if you push eighty. And it's too small, you can't sleep in it."

"And it's ugly."

The corner of Sam's mouth quirks. "And it's ugly," he concedes.

Dean grins for a second, his mind kinda fogged. "At least you were smart enough not to bother with trying to find a prettier car than mine."

"No such thing," Sam responds automatically, twisting a neat little knife in Dean's stomach.

"Aw, Sammy. What a sweet thing to say."

Sam smirks, still without opening his eyes and his face is so tired and lined, his big hands curled on his knees.

"I thought I saw you once, you know," Sam says, sounding faintly detached. "Getting on the highway right when I was getting off, this, this perfect-looking car. Black, shiny black and you know how it can blind you sometimes, if the sun hits it right? It was like that. This blinding black thing flying away down the highway. And then it was crazy, I rolled over the median hooking a U, and I got back on the road and took off after it. I just. I wanted to see, I thought it was you and I wanted to see. I musta followed it for a hundred miles. Crummy little car could barely keep up, I'd see you on the horizon and then I'd lose sight again and again. It was. It was so strange. It didn't seem like any time was passing at all."

Sam's hand squeezes into a slow fist. Dean is holding his breath, glancing compulsively at Sam's smoothed-shut eyelids, the long exposed edge of his throat. Dean's hands are white-knuckled on the wheel, all the energy in his body dedicated to just holding on.

"But then I caught up at a truckstop and it wasn't you. It wasn't even an Impala."

Sam falls silent and Dean doesn't know what to say. He keeps feeling like Sam is speaking in code, like there are secrets to be found in the pauses and breaths, the times that Sam's voice cracks and the careful knead of Sam's fist into his leg.

"Why," Dean hears, and realizes after a second that it's him. He swallows, figures what the hell, and continues, "Why'd you follow it?"

There is a very long moment in which Sam does not answer and Dean is certain that he won't. Lines dig deeper on Sam's forehead and Dean wants to push his hand across, clear Sam's brow as easily as a plane of sand. But Dean can't fix anything anymore, and he worries that he's made it worse by asking Sam why. Why is a more dangerous question than it used to be, because after all, why does Dean want to have sex with his little brother? Why does it feel like he'll die if he can't? After everything he's done and everyone he's saved, why has God let this happen to him?

"I thought it was you," Sam says, his voice low and uncertain.

And Dean shakes his head, teeth hard against the inside of his lip. "But why would you want to follow me?" Doesn't say, barely bites back, _you're the one who wanted to leave._

"I just wanted to see," Sam insists, his eyes staying ever-closed. "I wasn't gonna do anything, I just wanted to see if it was you."

"That's not-" Dean starts, his voice rising and he's getting angry, an upward flood in his chest, and he cuts himself off because of it, swallows whatever he'd been about to say and it wedges down his throat painfully.

"What?" Sam asks, sounding wary, honestly curious.

"Nothing." Dean grits his teeth, hands so hard on the steering wheel he can hear it squeak. "You wanna get some food before we get to it?"

Sam takes a long pause, but Dean refuses to look over at him. He hears Sam whisper, "Yeah, sure," and wonders if Sam's eyes are still closed.

(break)

Conversation stalls and lags in the diner and Dean wishes they'd just hit a taco truck. The waitress takes too long with everything, way down at the other end of the counter chatting with a few old men in John Deere caps while Sam and Dean sit side by side and stare at the coffee mugs cupped in their hands.

It's because they're almost done. Dean's feeling pretty good about Dennis Kelly either being or knowing the demon-raiser, and that means the hard part's done. He looks ahead twenty-four hours, maybe thirty-six at the outside, and he can see the two of them exchanging some kind of tortured goodbye in the motel parking lot, their two mismatched cars moving apart, each trapped in a rearview mirror.

He doesn't know if Sam's bothered by the same train of thought. He thinks probably not. Sam's all torn up about the case, haunted by the bedrooms of dead children, pinched looks and his hands trembling whenever they leave the mug. When it comes to guilt, Sam has a tendency to be single-minded. It kills Dean to see him going through it again, especially when he doesn't know what's gonna come next. God knows how long it'll be after they split up this time, now that the past four months seems like forty years in a desert, now that Dean can't imagine the idea of a half-year without seeing Sam, can't even process the possibly of never again.

These spare hours in this luckless draining Ohio summer might be the last Dean has of Sam, and it's thoughts like that that make talking hard.

When they get back in the car and back on the road, Dean considers his chances of making a break for it. Even Sam's not stubborn enough to jump out of a car going sixty. Dean just topped her off and he could have hundreds of miles to talk Sam into coming back, hours through the featureless heart of the country with nothing for them to look at but each other.

Dean gives up on the idea pretty fast, really just a misplaced early-evening daydream. It's got no logic behind it; Sam _is_ stubborn enough to sit stonefaced and silent, let Dean talk until his voice or the gas ran out, and then leave again without a word, forcing Dean to take the blame for the whole thing.

Dean drives with his wrists, slumped back. He's been exhausted for a long time, but nothing like the constant wearing of Sam's presence.

Sam directs Dean to the address listed for Dennis Kelly, which takes them farther out of town, into the woods. Dean makes a not-funny crack about the Unabomber and Sam rolls his eyes and ignores him like he's seventeen again and too cool to laugh at anything.

Closing in, Dean drives down a narrow dirt road with his headlights on, trees dark and pressing close, and he thinks he's seeing things when there's a flash of silver suddenly through woven forest, but Sam sees it too, saying:

"What the hell?"

Dean leans forward over the wheel, comes around the last shallow curve and for a second he thinks he's looking at a spaceship, experiencing a jolt of amazement.

"Dude," Sam says. "Old school."

The headlights fall on it fully and its bizarre shape solidifies for Dean, an Airstream trailer the color of dulled platinum. It's on blocks and obviously has been for decades, the weeds grown up over the metalwork, dents pocked on the side like buckshot.

"Where was it-" Dean starts to say, and Sam answers, "Blackfoot, Idaho. Summer I was fifteen."

Dean nods, remembering it clearly, the silver trailer on the outskirts where they'd lived like anchovies in a can, training in fathomless heat and sweating out in the sere ink-colored shadow of a gnarled tree. He remembers the smears and partial handprints of dirt on Sam's bare skin, the scuffmarks on his broad shoulders as they rolled through the dry grass.

Next to the Airstream is a shed, quilted together from pieces of corrugated tin and plastic, rotting sections of plywood, and in front of the shed is parked a junker of a pick-up truck that has taken on the indeterminate brown color of the unpaved road. Dean pulls up next to the truck, and as they both step out, the door to the trailer bangs open, sharp as a shot.

"You from the police or the papers?" a man shouts from the door, gravelly and strident.

Sam throws Dean a questioning look over the hood of the car, and Dean shrugs. Sam calls back, "We're not police!"

The man is smallish with steel-colored hair, big thick glasses, and Dean doesn't like the way he's got one hand out of view, holding something just inside the doorframe. Dean has pretty much all his money on it being a firearm of some kind, and he hopes that Sam has seen it and stays behind his open door.

"You here about the fires?" the man asks.

Sam looks over at Dean again but Dean can't read his expression, then answers, "We're here about Patricia."

The man's mouth opens but he doesn't say anything for a long moment. Slowly, he pulls his hand back into view and takes the few steps down to the dirt. Sam and Dean swing their car doors shut and walk out to meet him.

"Pete," the man says, the papery skin of his face covered in salt-white stubble and his watery blue eyes enormous, magnified by his glasses.

"Steve Gaines," Sam says, offering his hand.

The man shakes his head, pursing his lips. "No, that's what we called her. Patricia. She always liked to be called Pete."

"I hadn't heard that, sir." Sam lets his hand fall. "You're Dennis Kelly?"

The man nods, eyeing Sam suspiciously, then Dean, then Sam again. Dean is kinda creeped out, Kelly's gaze fluid and unblinking, drinking in the both of them and drinking something out of them, lessening them somehow.

"I won't take too much of your time, Mr. Kelly," Sam says. "We work for _The Dayton Sentinel_ and we'd like to ask you about what happened to your daughter."

"Been twenty years since they killed her," Kelly tells him. "Everybody knows all there's to know already."

Sam bobs his head earnestly. "Yes sir, twenty years this October, that's why we wanted to do a retrospective of the accident and the community response."

"Community response," Kelly echoes with a sneer, something flaring suddenly in his eyes. "Let those kids _walk_, that was the community's goddamn response."

Dean glances at Sam but Sam doesn't see it, all his attention focused on Kelly, his brow conscientiously furrowed.

"You don't think the plea bargain reached by the hunting club was fair?"

"_Fair_?" Kelly's voice goes tremulous, and the brightness in his eyes goes sharp at the edges, almost neon in its intensity. "Pete was on my land, not a hundred yards from here. Her own goddamn backyard, and they came in and shot her. Just a little girl. No reason for it. My Pete never hurt nobody."

"Yes sir," Sam says quietly.

"I sat in that courtroom thinkin' those kids were gonna pay for what they did, and I watched them walk out of there."

The light in Kelly's eyes continues to grow, swollen out of proportion by the thickness of his lenses, and Dean realizes that it can't be natural about the same time Sam does, each of them swaying backwards slightly.

"Can you boys even imagine what that's like?" he finishes on a decrepit hiss, broken yellow teeth bared. Sam shakes his head but Dean doesn't move, his eyes locked on Kelly. Dean slips his hand behind his back and sets it on the gun in his belt.

"No, it's terrible," Sam says. "I can't think of a worse thing."

Four kids burned alive in their beds is kinda worse. Dean thinks of contributing, but stays quiet.

Kelly nods, blinking slowly a few times. Dean recognizes the traces of a life-changing grief on the man's face, like childhood scars breaking and paling as you grow but always there. Some stuff you don't ever get over. Most of the people Dean meets on this job carry that kind of grief around with them, and he never gets used to seeing it.

But beyond the sorrow, Dean can also see a razor's edge of madness, glinting cold. Kelly smells faintly of sulfur, and that eerie light in his eyes refuses to fade. Dean keeps his hand on his gun, keeps one eye on Sam.

"It was all a long time ago," Kelly says, then adds, mumbled in afterthought, "They get theirs, anyway."

"The fires?" Sam asks immediately, and Dean winces because it's too soon to bring that up.

Kelly's face sharpens with suspicion, boring into Sam and Dean catches the momentary flash of panic across Sam's expression, the subtle duck of his throat.

"I don't know nothing about that. I already told the cops, told 'em every damn time they came."

Sam's nodding fast, his hands up. Color is rising on his face and he's losing eloquence as he says, "Of, of course not, Mr. Kelly, I wouldn't, I didn't mean to suggest-"

Dean jumps in then, this old habit he has of rescuing his brother. "So what do you think is actually happening?" he asks Kelly, genuine and without aggression. "I mean, it can't be a coincidence, right? Four of the eight losing their kids like this?"

Kelly smiles then, a sincerely terrifying thing to see, all malicious glee and insane zealotry. Dean recoils half an inch, barely sees the twitch of Sam doing the same.

"The Lord's seeing to it." Kelly sounds as certain as the color of the sky. His eyes are as big as eggs, mesmerizing and electric blue.

Dean wants to take a few slow steps backward, just to get within arm's reach of the car again, and he would really feel a whole lot better if Sam would get his hand on a weapon of some kind. Sam suddenly seems unacceptably exposed, red-shirted like a target and his chest unprotected, his hands hanging defenseless at his sides. Dean wishes there was a way to put his body between Kelly's and Sam's without making things weird.

"You think someone's doing His work for Him?" Sam asks carefully.

"I think the Lord doesn't need a middleman," Kelly answers. "If He wants to send down a hand of fire to collect those children, I don't question His plan."

"Hand of fire," Dean repeats under his breath, weirdly fascinated by the thought of it, and Sam glances at him quickly, the corners of his mouth taut.

"That's what you think is happening?" Sam asks. "Divine retribution for Pete?"

Kelly moves his shoulders and looks away, out into the dark woods. "I don't know," he says, ringing a bit hollow. "She deserves it, though. She was the best thing I ever did."

Sam bows his head, his face twisted, so Dean's the one who says, "Yes sir," one last time.

(break)

"It's him, right?" Dean says as soon as they get out of view.

"It's definitely him."

"'The Lord doesn't need a middleman,'" Dean mocks, making his voice gruff and splintery. "Satan kinda does, though, huh?"

Sam rests his knee on the dashboard, slumped down in his seat and drumming his fingers on his leg. "I couldn't tell if that guy was crazy or possessed."

"He can't be both? Lost his daughter, went a little crazy; delved into black magic for two decades, got a little possessed."

A ghost of a smile passes over Sam's face. Dean gives a little inner cheer that Sam's still got the ability.

"And it's gotta be the shed, yeah?" Sam says. Dean nods.

"No doubt. There's not enough room in those Airstreams."

"I remember. That couch you found-"

Dean smirks, knowing immediately what Sam's talking about. That summer they'd spent in Idaho, and the sweet blue plaid couch that he'd paid fifty bucks for at a garage sale, and how he and Sam had strained and sweated just wedging it through the door of their trailer, only to find that it was six inches too long in every direction. Dean had left it in the yard and slept out there for a week, until he was woken up by pelting rain, his eyes clearing to see Sam laughing and swinging from the tree, shirtless and barefoot in the deluge.

"That couch was way cooler than anything else we've ever owned," Dean informs Sam.

"Especially when it started growing mildew all over. That was awesome."

Sam says it in a deadpan and Dean assumes it's sarcastic because that's the only kind of joke Sam makes anymore, but he decides to take it at face value because it _was_ kind of awesome. It was like the couch was turning into a giant Chia pet.

"And then Dad let us use it for practice with the machetes," Dean says happily. "That was even better."

"Yeah, we kicked that couch's ass." Sam lets out a long exhale. Dean looks over and Sam's got his eyes closed.

"You're tired?" he asks and it sounds kinda strange but he can't pinpoint why.

Sam nods slightly. "You had your little nap."

"Yeah, 'cause I red-lined it all night instead of sleeping."

"I didn't sleep last night, either."

Dean stares at the spray of headlights on the trees, trying not to look back at Sam because he's not sure he'll be able to stop. He thinks about Sam up all night, pacing the close confines of the room with his phone on the bed and the television on mute. Waiting for Dean and filling his mind with the thought of him, pushing his hands through his hair the way Sam does when he can't sit still.

"Well, you shoulda took a nap then," Dean says, hating how hoarse he sounds.

"I've been preoccupied."

"No, really?" One quick glance just to see the corner of Sam's mouth curl up in that tired fraction of a smirk that seems all he can offer. Dean continues, "It's not much of an excuse, anyway."

"I know." Sam pauses. "Maybe we're overthinking it. Maybe hunting is harder because we're trying to do it on three hours of sleep every night."

Dean shifts uncomfortably. "I sleep more than that."

"Liar." Sam barely even dignifies it. "The simplest explanation, Dean."

"Hardly. Even if you're right, not being able to sleep is just another symptom."

Sam doesn't answer for a minute, and when Dean looks over Sam's eyes are open, thinned and glittering. He's not looking at Dean, fixed on the road ahead, and Dean wonders half-heartedly if he's ever gonna have all of Sam focused on him again.

"All right," Sam says, measuring out each word. "Then how come you can't sleep?"

Dean tightens his grip on the steering wheel. "Nightmares."

He sees Sam nodding in his peripheral vision. Dean swallows with a click, trying to imagine what Sam's nightmares must be like.

"And it's too quiet," Sam says very soft.

It hits Dean hard. He doesn't know why but it feels like an anvil landing on his chest, hearing Sam say that. Since Sam got over his hero-worship of Dean, he has told his big brother to shut up approximately a dozen times a day. Sometimes it's like Sam barely tolerates Dean, like Dean's voice and taste in music actually hurt him, but as it turns out the world doesn't sound right to Sam if Dean's not there.

"Yeah," he says, cautious and without inflection. He feels like he might be about to throw up or crash into a tree or something equally dramatic, but he's got a good poker face.

"So," Sam says slow. "What're we gonna do about that?"

Dean almost bites through his lip. He doesn't say anything for almost a full minute, squeezing the steering wheel and trying to calm down enough to think rationally. It doesn't really work. Sam's so close, been so close all day and it's like free smack after months in rehab. It's driven Dean kinda nuts, and he blurts out:

"What, anything you want-" before he hears himself and cuts off, horrified.

Another full minute of silence passes, and Dean does not look at Sam, counting the pieces of broken yellow line rolling under his wheels. He can hear Sam breathing slightly ragged and the several times he makes a sound but no word follows. Dean is glad for it because he's pretty sure whatever Sam says next is going to be fatal. Dean cannot believe what a fucking wreck he's made of things.

But all Sam says next is, "Dean," and he sounds so forlorn, all the air crushed out of him, and Dean closes his eyes for a spare second.

He looks over and Sam is looking back, drawn and solemn, sadder than Dean has ever seen him. "It's never gonna go away, is it?" Sam says, his voice cracking.

Dean drags his eyes back to the road, blinking fast and fighting a burn in his sinuses. He shakes his head jerkily, trying to banish the crippled note in Sam's voice, the heartbreaking expression on his face. Dean can't even calculate how much damage he's done to his brother, it's like trying to count stars.

"Not for me," Dean answers, dead honest.

Sam makes a low noise like a moan and presses his fist against his eye. He's nodding, looking pained. Dean's mouth is dry and his mind is spinning, a thousand possible timelines flickering past, all the crazy things he might say next. He wants to tell Sam that this is the kind of love men fight crusades for. It's greater than the two of them, greater than the unfortunate circumstances of their births or their inevitable sanguine end. A force like gravity, like luck and faith and memory, an epic poem so beautiful that it gets passed down orally for five thousand years before anyone bothers to write it down. He wants to tell him that together they can overcome anything, but Dean's never been able to lie to Sam.

"You're just so," Sam says and then stops and scrubs at his face and tries again, "I thought I could. Get over it. Get some distance. I thought if I didn't see you-"

"Don't," Dean interrupts, his heart pounding and he's so scared it's making him sick.

"Why not? Is there anything I could say that's gonna fuck up the relationship _more_?"

Dean really has no answer to that, and Sam continues, sounding kinda frantic, pushing the words out:

"It was like cabin fever, temporary insanity. That way you get when you're drunk, something. That stuff's not supposed to, to linger, and I thought it was just seeing you every day. Seeing nothing but you. And on my own I could work it out of my system. You know. Figure out how to break the curse."

A laugh fights out of Dean, a single cough-like sound. "You thought we were cursed?"

Sam sends him a sidelong look, shadowy and weighted. "Well, gee, Dean, I've become overwhelmed by the urge to stick my hand down my brother's pants, and it's fucked me up beyond comprehension. Cursed didn't seem too much of a stretch."

He really shouldn't say things like that, Dean thinks kinda woozily. His head is crowded suddenly with vivid flashes, Sam's fingertips sliding south down his stomach, his wrist caught and pinned by Dean's belt, the rough edges of Sam's fingers and his wide smooth palm, moving fast and graceless and eager and _Jesus_.

Dean nearly sideswipes a Cadillac, a high bleat of a horn chasing behind them, and Sam barely flinches. Absurd random death would not exactly be out of place, so Dean dedicates himself to the road again.

"But nothing I did worked," Sam tells him. "Everywhere I went was the same."

Dean is nodding blindly, trying with everything he's got to figure out where Sam's going with this. Dean has seen how wretched Sam has become, but it never seemed plausible that they've been suffering from the same disease, this thing that Sam is making sound hopeless.

"And now you're back."

Dean waits for him to add to that, but Sam refuses, weaving his hands between his legs so the streetlight washes across and catches photo-like images. He's staring out the window and his face is still except for that one traitorous muscle in his jaw that you have to know him pretty well to look for.

Yes, Dean is back, but god only knows how long that'll last. This whole deal is like living in a minefield, a hair-trigger away from dismemberment.

"I believe I was summoned," Dean manages.

"Yeah well. You see how well I'm doing without you."

"That cuts both ways."

"Dean." And Sam takes a strange sudden breath, quiet for a moment. "I can't even think of a name for what you are to me anymore. Do you. You know what I mean?"

Dean shakes his head automatically, but he knows Sam's right and he's sure it shows on his face. He's tried very hard not to put specific words to it, because he doesn't want to be Sam's lover or god forbid his boyfriend, and _brother_ just sounds like backstory these days. Dean just wants Sam. He doesn't want to define it any better than that.

Sam blows out a breath. "I'm having trouble stomaching it. This can't be a normal way to feel about a person, blood relation or not."

"I don't think you can separate out the blood relation part."

"Sure, sure you can. Part of this is about you being my brother and part of it is something else."

"Oh, it's really really not." Dean coughs, his chest feeling tight. He's twenty miles above the speed limit and just flying. "I didn't forget you were my brother that night."

"You just didn't care."

"I. Yes."

"That's not a problem for you?"

"Sam, I, I don't even know what you want me to say."

"Honestly I'm thrilled I got you to say this much."

"Yeah, much less of a _girl_ over here," Dean sneers.

"I'm sorry, did you want to go back to communicating with me through fucking voicemail," Sam almost shouts.

"I never wanted to in the first place!"

"Dean!" Sam punches the dashboard, his mouth half-open and gnashing. "Maybe you haven't noticed but this thing is _killing both of us_, will you please at least talk to me about it."

Dean is really driving too fast for this conversation. His heart feels like it's about to punch out of his chest and he can clearly picture it skidding wetly across the dash, pages of intermittent yellow light washing across it. He's kinda breathless and he can't understand anything that's happening, this apocalyptic scent in the air.

"I don't know what you want me to say," Dean says, and sees Sam's eyebrows hunch down because Dean's said that before. Dean tries to do better. "I don't know how to explain it any better, I wish I did. I wish I wasn't like this but I can't help it."

"It's not just you."

Dean shakes his head, not wanting to hear that right now. "I know it's not right. I knew that while it was happening and ever . . . ever since. I wish you hadn't left, but I get why you did."

"Really?" Sam doesn't believe him.

"You're a better person than I am, Sam, and you, you always have been. I know it's not right but I don't care, I can't. I'm not gonna get better. You were smart to take off."

And Sam crumples, burying his face in his hands. Dean's stomach flips over, staring at the shuddering arch of Sam's back. He pulls off the road into a church parking lot, saying, "Sammy," in a futile tone.

"I didn't leave 'cause it's wrong," Sam says from behind his hands. His voice is a wrecked thing, strained and uneven. "You think I care about morality at this point?"

Dean's hand flutters over Sam's shoulder and he hesitates and hates himself, hates how miserable Sam is right now and how fucking ineffectual he has become in the face of it.

"Then why?" Dean asks.

Sam moans. "Jesus, Dean, you already have almost everything. This thing, it, it's too much. It's asking for too much."

Dean takes it like a man, pulling back and looking away and swallowing a few times. The church is white clapboard and small-town perfect except for the great hole torn in the dark-shingled roof, patched over with a blind swatch of tarp, the kind of thing that happens when a tornado uproots a tree and tosses it around. Dean remembers sheltering in basements without heat or power, Sam tucked warm and slight under his arm because Dad had said, you take care of your brother, just like always.

Sam is probably right. Dean has been appalled by the course his life has taken, dull and colorless and fraught with nameless danger, and he knows it's because Sam means more to him than God ever intended. There's this power Sam has over him. It makes Dean do the craziest things.

"If I can get all of you," Dean says without looking over. "You can have all of me."

There's a long moment where nothing happens. Dean doesn't breathe and doesn't move. He doesn't think or wonder or meet Sam's eyes, staring at the wounded church and trying not to pray.

Sam touches the side of Dean's face, just a brief stroke of two fingertips along the line of his cheekbone, and Dean flinches hard, sucks in a breath between his teeth. He kinda sees it coming.

"I, I can't," Sam manages, his throat thick. "I did that once before."

Dean can't think of anything to say for the longest time. He clutches the steering wheel like it's the last rung of a broken ladder. He's not built for this kind of stuff. He doesn't know how to explain it to Sam, this dogged certainty he has that they've been crippled and the only solution is to go through life holding each other up.

Sam says his name and makes Dean look over at him. He's slumped, all his strings cut, a profoundly sad look on his face. Dean feels deeply out of character, cravenly clinging to his car and scared to even look at his brother, and Sam seems to feel the same way, his eyes skittering over Dean's face and not catching.

"Dean," Sam says again, and this time it's mostly a whisper. "Please understand that it's breaking my heart."

Dean makes a sound not close to a laugh, and lets his head fall onto the steering wheel. Everything that happens to him these days is fucking unbelievable, and it's not even the monsters. His stomach is trying to crawl up his throat, as if Sam rejecting him needs a physical response.

Never had a chance, he thinks, and weirdly enough, it settles him a little. He insists to himself forcefully, _you were never gonna end up with your fucking brother_, and wonders bleakly if it will ever ring true.

(break)

concluded in ch 3


	3. Chapter 3

They make it back to the motel in a weary, soul-depleting silence. What could Dean say, what could he do? He made his big play and all, drew the curtain back on his finally-offered heart, and he got shot down. It would have been incredibly awkward even without the incest part.

Dean watches the road. He's not unaware that Sam is watching him. Motionless and almost without blinking, Sam is watching Dean.

Dean is trying not to drive them off the side of the road and he is trying to get them somewhere, _away_, into the future where he will be better able to cope. Back there in the church parking lot looked an awful lot like the worst moment of his life; so away, away, he's heading west and he doesn't want to stop until he hits the Pacific.

He gets to the motel and slots in right next to Sam's car. Nobody's staying here but them. It's getting late, all the stores closing, Mexican waiters in white shirts smoking out back of the lone restaurant, and still the heat hangs thick in the air.

Once they get in the room, Sam stops looking at Dean. Dean is picking at his shirt, sweat-stuck to his shoulders as the air conditioning in the room coughs bronchially, sputtering. Sam roots around in his bag and gets a pair of guns and his journal, sits cross-legged on the bed, letting his hair slant in front of his eyes.

Dean stands there for longer than can be considered normal. He sees from the flush crawling up Sam's neck, the pretty color on his face, that Sam thinks Dean is staring at him, and Dean is, always. He wonders, what should I do? and not a goddamn thing comes to him and he thinks tiredly that the social taboo against sleeping with your siblings almost assuredly arose from the unrelenting drama that ensues from the same (and two-headed babies, hardly a concern at the moment). Dean knows just about everything there is to know about Sam, all except this one last thing.

Dean moves like he's coming to Sam's side of the bed, and Sam's back hitches abruptly, but Dean veers off into the bathroom, closing the door hard. He blinks as if awaking from a blackout, wondering what the hell he's doing in here, but he goes with it.

Wash your face, Dad's voice set on repeat, the kind of thing that has Dean moving on autopilot. He'd be panicked, twelve or fourteen and usually because something had happened to Sammy, a broken arm from falling out of a hayloft, blue-lipped and gray-skinned and half-drowned on the riverbank, the bloodied claw marks under Sam's ribs. Their dad would say sharply, Dean, go wash your face and then come back here and help me.

It always worked and it works now. Thirty seconds to fall apart in a small room where no one could see, no idea if he was crying or how hard because the water was pouring as fast as it would go and hot as he could stand, and then he could go back out and do whatever needed to be done.

He comes back out and obligingly doesn't try to meet Sam's eyes. He sits down a couple feet away and reaches for one of the guns, taking it apart without a thought.

Sam lets Dean clean both his weapons, then raises his head and announces what the general plan of attack should be. Dean wants to roll his eyes, because obviously he knows how to foil a necromancer gone bad, but he lets Sam go into the pedantic detail he loves so well.

They'll go back out at midnight, of course. Most of the important events in Dean's life have happened at midnight.

They have a while to kill and Dean doesn't think they'll make it if they stay in the room, not with the angled looks Sam keeps giving him, the brief minute depression that appears when he sucks on the inside of his lip. He suggests a beer and Sam agrees right away.

It's just Dean's luck that they find a bar where it's actually possible to have a conversation with someone. He hoped for the typical blasting jukebox, a fiver stuffed in his pocket to be sacrificed for quarters, but instead he and Sam sit across from each other in a booth and gaze out at the sparse crowd, the silence conspicuous and oppressive.

It all feels very anticlimactic. They've become every other quasi-relationship Dean has ever had, stiltedly sharing that last beer, that final cup of coffee in the overbright morning before parting ways forever. It's godawful, seeing the blank expression on Sam's face and listening to the other people laughing, and Dean finishes his first beer too quickly, hiding his mouth. He shoots the waitress a signal and a wink, knowing that Sam won't let him have more than two.

"Are we gonna kill him?" Sam asks.

Dean's surprised, his head jerking. Sam's staring down at his hands. "Dude-"

"I said it quiet."

"Well, maybe, but you still, you shouldn't just, like, ask like that."

"It's kinda relevant, and only getting more so." Sam pauses, then says, "Four little kids. Burned them alive."

"You don't think we put the actual fear of God in him? Scare him straight?"

"You met him. You don't talk sense to the insane."

"Not with _that_ attitude."

Sam rolls his eyes. He's got both hands curled around his bottle and his long fingers are intertwined, dotted with condensation and Dean imagines Sam's big hands open on his chest, latched on his hips and leaving invisible fingerprints. It's just an idle thought, a way to keep warm; it hurts pretty bad.

"Four little kids," Sam repeats. Dean manages not to roll his eyes right back, but it's an effort.

"You've been on the case too long to be objective."

Sam's eyes flash and his mouth tightens; he doesn't like his professionalism called into question. "You haven't been on it long enough to talk."

Dean sneers. "Nice."

There are two spots of color high on Sam's cheeks. His knuckles stand out well-defined, his hands and the bottle welded together as solid as a stone.

"Your plan is basically to put him on the fucking honor system," Sam says. "Make him promise never to do it again, I'm so sure that'll work."

"Don't be stupid," Dean says, sharper than he intends because it irritates the fuck out of him when Sam plays dumb. "I didn't say that. And since when did you get all fucking bloodthirsty?"

That hits harder than Dean meant it to, a full-body flinch from Sam, his beer skidding on the table. His face falls, anger gone like a thrown switch and the look that replaces it is naked and betrayed, cuts Dean clean down to the bone.

Sam shakes his head a few times, his mouth moving uselessly. "I'm not," he manages eventually.

Dean doesn't really want to take it back, but he says, "I know," because he didn't know it would make Sam look like this.

Sam looks like he's gonna say something more, but he takes a drink instead. The waitress delivers Dean's second beer and they drink in slow measured silence for the next few minutes. Dean rubs at his forehead distractedly and tries not to look at Sam, tracing his fingers around the initials carved in the table and experiencing the distinct feeling that he's lived this moment before.

"Where's next?" he hears himself asking, his eyes fastened on a matched set of girls at the bar.

"I haven't had time to look for anything," Sam says. "Been a little preoccupied."

"So I've heard." Dean scratches at the label of his beer. "But you've got to head in a direction when you leave this place, right?" Sam doesn't answer long enough for Dean to give in to the dumb joke impulse. "Lemme guess: Atlantic City."

"That's exactly it."

Dean smirks without looking over at him. He might never look at Sam again; it's just easier. "I've got this haunted Boy Scout camp in Wyoming. Trying to get to it before the first big snow."

"Wait, outside Green River?" Sam asks.

"Yeah."

"Did it already."

"What?"

Sam nods, his hands folded neatly in a way that manages to irritate Dean in spite of everything. "Six weeks, maybe two months back. Not too challenging, but I had to buy a tent. You know how expensive that shit has gotten?"

Dean nods automatically. He's slightly aghast at how everything seems to be an omen of one thing or another, all the strange constellations of a portentous summer, but that's only because he's shit at interpreting them.

"What was it?" he asks Sam, who shrugs and pushes his hair back with the side of his hand.

"Typical, these pioneers who went cannibal. Only took a couple of days." Sam takes a drink, eyes slit and focused on Dean. "You were following a bit of a weak lead, it would seem."

It's Dean turn to shrug. "Not really. Good lead, just not updated."

"You heard a rumor. You were following a _rumor_." Sam spits it out like it tastes bad.

"Yeah, and?"

"You were gonna hike five miles into the wilderness to confront something you'd heard a rumor about. A badly outdated rumor, I think we can agree on that if nothing else. Just walk right out there without any concrete idea what it could be or what it might do."

"I was gonna be well-armed, Sam."

Sam's eyes narrow. "That's less than comforting."

Dean shows his hands, once again at a loss as to what Sam wants from him. "I'm not much for the research stuff, you know that."

"I thought that was only when you had me around to scut the work."

"No, that's pretty much all the time. Think back. Try to remember if you once saw me studying in high school."

"That's no kind of excuse. This isn't some class you don't give a shit about."

"It's not? Hard to tell from all the lecturing."

Sam sits back, crossing his arms over his chest. The expression on his face is a fluid mix of exasperation and frustration and the immovable fondness that is the cause of all their troubles. He's set his gaze in a darkly impressive scowl, and Dean half-cocks an eyebrow, a mad urge to grin bubbling up because he loves it when Sam gets like this.

"The great Dean Winchester, can't even tell you the name of what he's trying to kill."

Dean waves it away. "I kill 'em, that's what counts."

"Yeah, until you kill one and then its brother kills you because hey! You didn't even know there were two of them."

Something about how he says it riles Dean more than he expected, half a snarl warping Sam's mouth, jerking his head to the side to get his hair out of his eyes. He can tell from the tense muscles in Sam's forearms that he's got both hands in fists, hidden against his chest. It's all suddenly unbelievably obnoxious, nothing more so than Sam acting like he has the right to be pissed at Dean right now.

"Unless you're planning to resume watching my back sometime soon, I guess that's just the way it goes," Dean says, trying for cold and detached but he sounds kinda numb to his own ears.

It's a direct hit, and Sam's the first to look away. Dean watches Sam's throat swallowing and hates himself a little bit for not looking away too.

"Probably my least favorite thing about you," Sam says after a moment. He sounds dull and weird. "Your willingness to put your life in danger just to spite me."

"This is not _spite_."

They fall into a fast silence, the air between them dense and shimmery, anticipatory. Sam is blinking fast, staring at the table. His lips move but he doesn't say anything, praying some mysterious rosary, and Dean tries to reconcile the tired young man before him with the picture of Sam that scowled and laughed in his mind for four years, four months, the various lifetimes Dean has lived without him. Sam was once all light and spark and he loved Dean without pause, without conditions or restrictions, and now he's like a mirror's reflection in an unlit room. His love for Dean has become a photo negative, an articulation of empty space.

It occurs to Dean, not for the first time, that he is the worst thing that's ever happened to Sam.

Dean picks at the label of his beer, little curls of paper sticking under his fingernails, and keeps an eye on the pool table in case he feels like making some money. He's trying to fight this sinking feeling in his chest, tiny pieces of fear coalescing in his heart like lead shot drawn to a magnet. Somewhere there's a giant clock with blood-red numbers, counting down the minutes he has left with Sam.

"West," Sam says, and Dean jumps, sending a white napkin fluttering down like a flag. Sam looks at him, faint lines bracketing his mouth, hollow-eyed and clear, every inch the broken man that Dean's little brother has grown up to be. "I think after this one's done I'm gonna go west."

(break)

By the time they get back to Kelly's place, the moon is directly overhead, caught in the narrow alley between the trees like a pearl in a net. They're not talking anymore, perhaps finally out of accusations to hurl, but that's doubtful. It's more pent-up, feels more like they're both physically suffering to get through these last few hours, no energy to spare for words.

Dean parks a few hundred yards from the Airstream and shed and desiccated truck. Behind a curve in the road, under a thick stand of trees, they're five miles from a streetlamp and Dean has to roll in with the headlights off to avoid giving warning. Sam is mostly an outline, traced out by the dashboard lights, and when Dean turns off the car he disappears.

They get out and move to the front, feeling their way through the true black, and Sam surprises Dean by taking hold of his wrist, saying below a whisper, "Just until our eyes adjust."

Dean nods even though Sam can't see it, his mouth suddenly desert-dry. Sam's fingertips are on his pulse, his thumb a slash of pressure on the back of Dean's hand. They go up the road like that, listening to the soft crunch of each step.

The moonlight breaks through the trees and Dean is able to distinguish earth from sky, sniff out the slope of the road's curve. Shapes are coming into focus, but he doesn't say anything to Sam, who doesn't let him go until they're standing in the shadows at the edge of the clearing.

The Airstream sits dark and shuttered, lifeless as a spent bullet casing, but the cracks in the patchwork shed are glowing halloween orange, little papercuts of color in the gloom. Dean points at the shed, glancing at Sam and Sam is already staring at it, the planes of his face turning to stone. He takes a deep breath and Dean watches him straighten and line up his shoulders, two or three inches taller all of a sudden and radiating a disciplined kind of violence.

They move faster, unshouldering their packs and getting the necessary supplies, stashing the rest behind a tree. Dean checks his clip as they run softly across the flattened crabgrass, checks on Sam, who is leeched of color by the moonlight, made into a black-and-white movie.

Each taking a side of the crooked door, Sam meets Dean's eyes, his head cocked. The shed is pulsing heat, and Dean can hear Kelly's rocks-and-glue voice chanting in a language he doesn't recognize, words that sound slippery and infectious, and there's an inhuman howl rising under the old man's voice, a rush like the ocean.

Sam signals three and points at himself and Dean nods, steps back with his gun raised in both hands. Sam kicks in the door and he does it literally, punching the rickety scrap of plywood off its hinges and clear into the room.

The howl of the demon becomes suddenly deafening.

Sam goes first into the room, and Dean curses himself for the slip: oldest goes first, oldest _always_ goes first. He's hot on Sam's heels, straight into hell.

The ifrit is above them, a slithering twist of flame, black-hole eyes and mouth dripping fire and gnashing. Kelly has been knocked off his feet by the flying door, half-curled and dazed near the wall, and that's the only reason the demon hasn't killed them yet.

"Get him!" Sam shouts, and Dean starts to move towards Kelly, realizing belatedly that that leaves Sam to deal with the ifrit alone. He looks back, sweat burning in his eyes, and Sam is holding one hand up, his palm pale and empty, and reciting Latin verses. The ifrit writhes and shoots grasping tendrils of smoke and flame out towards Sam, but it can't break Sam's protective incantation without Kelly.

Dean grabs the old man and hauls him to his feet. The man's glasses have been cracked, a splinter of glass bisecting one unearthly blue eye.

"Call it off," Dean orders. Kelly sneers, his corroded teeth showing yellow and foul, and Dean slams him hard into the wall, the whole shed shuddering. "Call that fucking thing off my brother!"

Kelly laughs, cruel laugh rotted all the way through, and shouts at the ceiling, "O morning star, o son of the dawn, take up this fight."

Dean slams him again, and something snaps, either Kelly's rib or a piece of the wall. Dean is sucking down black smoke, feeling like he's bleeding from the eyes. The unholy shriek of the demon shatters through his skull, and Dean looks back to see Sam kicking over the candles, destroying the pentagram drawn in salt. Guttering tapers roll crazily across the floor.

"Send that thing back to hell, man, or you're going with it."

"Eye for an eye," Kelly rasps. "Child for a child."

"You've killed four!"

"They killed _first_."

And Kelly surges forward, manic power rushing through him, just able to dislodge Dean and get a clear line on the ifrit. Kelly raises both hands, arthritic and knotted into claws and drawing upwards, gutturally voicing the dead man's language again, and Dean sees the ifrit swell and flare impossibly bright, bearing down on Sam, who all at once looks so small.

Dean moves without thinking, crashing the butt of his gun right between Kelly's eyes. His glasses snap in half, gashing his forehead open, and he collapses in a pile at Dean's feet.

Dean whirls back to Sam, who's still holding the demon back, but only barely. Sam has both his hands raised, his face red and drenched with sweat and smeared with soot, and he's shouting at Dean, his mouth is moving and his throat straining, but the demon is so loud it takes Dean a minute to understand.

The altar, Sam is shouting, the altar, the altar, and Dean spots it in the far corner, unlit candles narrow as fingers, sigils and hieroglyphs written in crimson on a mirror. At the foot of it there are the remains of an animal sacrifice, the blood still glistening.

Dean snatches up the one straight-backed wooden chair and demolishes the altar, swinging for the fences and exploding the glass and thin wood. The constant ocean-roar of noise becomes unbearable for a second, pressure thundering against Dean's ears and he cries out without being aware of it, hunching over.

The demon roar recedes, and Sam's voice rises in its place. Torn-up and scoured by smoke, Sam's voice gets stronger, building like a wave. He's not holding the ifrit back anymore; he's banishing it, one last time now that the altar has been destroyed. Sam throws each word like a knife:

"_Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti._"

The ifrit spins in a furious whirlwind, faster and faster until it's suddenly sucked under the floorboards and disappears.

It's quiet all of a sudden. Dean can hear the crackle of the few small fires chewing at the walls, and the strangled wheeze of his own breath, and Kelly's faint unconscious moans, and Sam coughing violently, sounding like he's coming to pieces.

Sam falls out into the yard and Dean stumbles through the smoke to find him sprawled on the crabgrass, hauling in great sheafs of air. He's crying, tear tracks eaten through the soot on his face.

Dean's legs are shaky, and he lowers himself gingerly to sit next to Sam. His hand locks onto Sam's shoulder, fisted around a scrap of shirt. He doesn't say anything for a very long time, and then:

"You were good, Sammy."

Sam has stopped crying (maybe he never really was; maybe it was only the smoke), but his chest is still juddering faintly. He looks up at Dean, his face grimed and dark.

"Did you kill him?"

Dean shakes his head, but looks back at the shed, where smoke is weaving up from the splintered cracks. "I don't think so."

"Are you gonna?"

Dean looks down at Sam. Sam's eyes bleed so cleanly out of his dirty face, diamonds in coal. Dean shakes his head.

Sam sighs, but doesn't look upset. It's hard to say what he looks like, kinda broken open and scraped out. "He had a book. When I first kicked the door in, I saw him get knocked over and a book came out of his hand."

"Wait here." Dean leaves Sam to duck back into the shed. Kelly's still unconscious, slack-mouthed with his forehead against the ground, half his face covered in blood, and Dean binds his hands behind his back quickly with a hank of rope before searching out the book. He finds it under some debris, bound in ancient brown leather with the edges of the pages singed by a stray candle.

Dean returns to his spot at Sam's side, hands him the book and watches as Sam sits up and flips through it, squinting and running his fingers over the words, the macabre illustrations that Dean sees in shards and glimpses.

Sam says, "This is it. This is how he did it." He skims through it for a few more seconds, then closes it with a dim thud, hands it off to Dean. "Burn that, will you."

Dean obliges. They sit side by side on the old grass, bearing witness to the evolution of book into ash. Slowly Dean catches his breath, thinking disjointedly that if his hands were clean, he could wipe the dirt off Sam's face.

(break)

It's over.

Sam jimmies the door of the Airstream and they do a quick sweep to make sure Kelly doesn't have any back-up altars or anything. In the storage compartment under the single bunk, Dean finds the mother lode, an arsenal to put any god-fearing survivalist to shame. Guy like Kelly, Sam notes, isn't likely to have purchased his weaponry legally, and so they leave an anonymous tip with the cops before hightailing it out of there.

Dean gets them out of the woods, out from under the vast psychological weight of pure dark, and it's only in the washes of the streetlight through the car that he sees that Sam's trembling.

It's not much, and Sam is hiding it well with his hands clasped tight. He's staring straight forward, the muscle in his jaw flexing every few seconds. It's too bad for Dean that he can read Sam as well as he can, that he has to see all of this in such pinpoint detail.

"Are you okay?" Dean asks.

Sam shakes his head slowly once, twice. "No."

Dean nods, pressing his teeth to the inside of his lip and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. His mind is in kaleidoscopic pieces, his heart still pounding for some reason. Sam's not okay, but Sam's not alone.

They make it back to the motel and Dean's out of the car before he realizes Sam hasn't moved. He ducks his head back in and asks if Sam is coming or what.

Sam looks over and the stricken expression on his face lances through Dean, and he breathes out his brother's name in reflex. Sam flinches like it hurts to hear, and turns away, pushing and stumbling out of the car. Dean stays hunched over for a second, staring at the empty shotgun seat.

He follows Sam into the room and Sam hasn't bothered to turn on the light so Dean doesn't either. The curtains are open for the faded gold of the parking lot lights, and it's just enough. Sepia-toned, Sam's face is stark and unlined, reduced to the essentials.

Sam tosses his bag on the bed and then paces to the wall, paces back, almost goes into the bathroom but then doesn't, runs his hands through his hair and turns his back on Dean.

Dean leans back against the door, watching Sam carefully. Sam's shoulders are pulled up high, his back tense. Dean's throat is closing up a millimeter at a time, the air squeezed out of his lungs.

"I was somewhere in upstate New York," Sam says without turning around. "Right after I left, when I was still hitching. This trucker had picked me up and he'd already drunk half a flask of Jack and he made me finish it because he said if I didn't he would have to, and then bam, right off the road. And so I got drunk and you know how I get. Telling tales and all that. I told him, told him everything. All these jobs we'd been on, all the stuff we've killed. The wendigos and vampires and werewolves and I don't know what else, and he thought I was kidding, he kept laughing, saying, you kill me, kid."

Sam pauses, and then echoes himself, "You kill me, kid."

He's quiet, and Dean searches for something to say but what could he possibly, and anyway, Sam is continuing:

"And I was so drunk. So messed up back then, you wouldn't believe. He asked me why I was hitching around and I, I'd already told him so much that was true and he hadn't believed any of it. I thought it was okay. I thought he would only laugh. So I said, I'm in love with my older brother."

Time stops inside Dean for a second, a skipped heartbeat, a missed breath. He stares at Sam's back and thinks that he would give his right arm if Sam would just show his face.

"You should have seen him. Stopped laughing so fast it was like somebody had cut his throat. It was like the world had dropped out from under me. He left me on the side of the road and I, um. I nearly froze."

"Sam," Dean manages.

Sam shakes his head, and his voice is distant and lost as he says, "It. It's such an odd feeling. It's so strange what you do to me. It's been like this for years and I, I, I don't think I can take much more."

Dean can't hear any more, and he pushes off the door, crosses the room and stands at Sam's back, hovering his hand and not daring to touch.

"Listen to me," Dean tells him, swallowing back a taste like iron. "We can still fix this. We can still go back to like it was."

And Sam turns, takes Dean's face in his hands and kisses him hard on the mouth.

A bolt of heat wracks Dean's body, Sam's tongue against his for a split second as he grabs Sam's shirt to stay on his feet, hangs on when Sam pulls away and says shortly:

"No. We can't."

Dean stares at his brother, struck dumb and breathless. His mouth feels blistered, Sam's hands heavy and smoothing over his shoulders. Sam's eyes are dark as pitch and hooded, his face twisted with terrible desire. Sam looks like he wants Dean so much he's honestly scared of what he might do. Dean can sympathize; he's never wanted anybody in his life like he wants Sam at this moment.

"Sam," he breathes out, and hooks the collar of Sam's shirt, pulls Sam's mouth down to his.

It gets out of control so quickly. Both of Dean's hands are in Sam's hair and he can't get enough of kissing him, licking the inside of his mouth and feeling the vibration of his moan. Dean goes kinda crazy, silver stars exploding on the backs of his eyelids because god knows when he last took a breath, and Sam grins against his mouth, shoves him backwards onto the bed.

Fallen back on his hands, panting, Dean's eyes go wide when Sam strips off his shirt, simple as anything, and moves to stand between his legs. He stares at the taper of Sam's chest and the narrowly defined muscles of his stomach and Dean swears under his breath, kinda dazed by how turned on he is. Sam's huge hand curls around the back of his neck, steadying him completely.

"When I was a kid, I worshipped you," Sam tells him, almost conversationally except for the harsh drag of breath between words. "You knew how to fix stuff and you could make Dad laugh and you were never afraid of anything."

Dean shakes his head, not sure if it's false modesty or just a general wish for the conversation to cease. He slips his arms around Sam's waist and opens his mouth on his stomach, overcome at once by the salt and smoke taste of Sam's skin, the rough noise that Sam makes and how his hand tightens on Dean's neck.

"Then," Sam continues, his voice ever-so-slightly higher as Dean tugs Sam's jeans as low as they'll go and marks his teeth on the softly indented skin there. "When I was about thirteen you started to piss me off all the time."

Dean snorts half a laugh, rolls his eyes upwards to give Sam a look. "I think I remember that."

Sam grins and it almost stops Dean's heart how fucking gorgeous the kid is. He presses his forearm down flat and hard and warm on Sam's back, thumbs open Sam's fly. He watches Sam shiver for a long moment, his eyes screwed shut.

"It took. Took me the longest time to, to figure that out. You." Sam cards his fingers through Dean's short hair. "Because see, I thought I wanted to _hit_ you every time you said something smartass. Ah."

Sam trails off because Dean has worked his jeans off his hips and without thinking crossed some final line, because he's got his hand wrapped around his brother's dick and Sam is looking down at him with frank astonishment, like he somehow never expected that. Dean's finding it difficult to bear how young Sam looks in this light, so he closes his eyes and presses his face into Sam's hip.

Sam's voice is breaking up now, coming and going like a foreign radio station on a particularly clear night. He stutters and groans and moves his hips restlessly into Dean's hand, and Dean could get off on this alone, honest to god.

"Then I realized. I, I was sixteen, m-maybe less, and you. You were just, just trying to hold us all together. All you could do. And I knew then."

Dean takes his hand off him and Sam whimpers some automatic protest, but Dean shifts and swings him down onto the bed, flat on his back and the air whooshes out of him. Sam doesn't let go of the back of Dean's neck and the move feels balletic and beautifully timed, and now Sam is spread out underneath him and this is all Dean has ever wanted.

He licks up the line of Sam's throat, deeply undone by what it feels like when Sam speaks against his mouth.

"Dean. Dean. I was terrified." Sam fists both hands in Dean's shirt, pulling it away from his back. "I pr-pretended it didn't happen. Convinced myself I wasn't like that."

Dean sits up enough to let Sam pull his shirt off him, then folds back down, feeling drunk as his hands move on smooth heated skin. Sam cranes up and bites at his mouth and Dean kisses him for a long time, down and down with Sam's arms so heavy and warm around him.

"I ran away," Sam whispers directly in his ear, and Dean buries his face in Sam's throat, gripping his hip. He wants to leave a mark, wants to leave a hundred.

"And then you were so, so far away. I, god, I wasn't even the same person." Sam writhes faintly, sliding his knee up Dean's side. "California was like a dream and I. I could do crazy things. Even f-fall in love. With someone who wasn't you."

Dean presses his shut eyes tight as he can against Sam's neck. His hands are open, spanning Sam's ribs. "I never could," he admits, and feels Sam's hand latch back onto the nape of his neck.

"You never left," Sam tells him softly. He pulls Dean's head up and kisses him, rolls them both on their sides so he can get Dean's jeans open. Dean is shuddering, skidding his hands across his brother's body, trying to stay something like calm.

"After." Sam stops, rests his forehead on Dean's, his breath hesitant on Dean's lips. "After Jess. I didn't think I'd ever feel like smiling again. Much less anything else. It's not possible to imagine that kind of misery going away when you're in the middle of it."

Dean gets kind of uncomfortable and starts to draw back, but Sam won't have it, putting one leg over Dean's and notching their hips together and Dean's brain almost melts. He rocks against Sam mindlessly once, twice, rolling his head on Sam's shoulder and muttering nonsense.

Sam keeps them tight together and ducks his head to suck at the pulse hammering in Dean's throat.

"Then," Sam says, his teeth sparking on Dean's skin. "I don't know when. My life was such a fucking, such a mess. And all of a sudden it was just you again." He makes a sound that Dean thinks is supposed to be a laugh, but it doesn't work at all, deformed and brittle. "Just you. Like I got hit by a train."

Dean doesn't like the sound of that, doesn't like the sound of any of this, really, a recitation of the tolls he has taken on Sam. There is something frantic and almost unwilling about the press of Sam's body against his own, the hard drag of his mouth. It forces Dean to remember that somewhere on the other side of tonight is the brutal light of morning.

He flips Sam onto his back and slips down, mouthing the solid curve of Sam's collarbone and sliding his hand back between Sam's legs. It amazes him, Sam thrashing and keening in the back of his throat, his eyes smudged and fierce, pupils blown and his working mouth swollen and slack. Look what I can do, he thinks giddily, and he can feel Sam's legs shaking hard against his sides.

Sam isn't supposed to be coherent anymore, but with his head tossed to the side and the length of his throat gleaming, he says brokenly, "Can't bear it. Can't, can't look at you. Can't be in the same room and I can't. Can't anymore. Got nothing left."

Baring his teeth on Sam's chest, Dean says with a sharp crack in his voice, "Shut up."

Sam moans, "It's my life, Dean, my whole life," and Dean pins his shoulders down, holds his legs open and leans down close enough to taste Sam's lips as he snarls, vicious and groundless and free:

"Not another fucking word,"

and then Sam crushes their mouths together and nothing else that gets said that night is worth writing down.

(break)

Dean dreams a new dream.

He and Sam are out back of the old Airstream, summer in Idaho that Dean recognizes by the gnarled shadow of the single tree, carved into the ground. Sam is fifteen again, stick-legged and narrow-chested, barefoot in the charred yellow grass. Dean's shirt is plastered to him, two sizes too small and subtly choking off his air.

Sam grins brilliantly, and it sends a spike of pain through Dean's head. "You've gotten awful slow."

Dean rolls his eyes. "Some of us didn't get freakish stork legs during puberty."

Sam makes an outraged sound and shakes his head briskly, letting gold-colored dust cloud around him. He counts off, "One, two, three," and then disappears for an instant, just winks out of existence with his outline remaining in the dust. He's back before Dean has time to blink.

"Just ran to Jersey and back," Sam announces, his face flushed, wind-burned and sand-scarred. He smirks at Dean and gracefully bends one leg to scratch at the back of the other with his toe. "You're just scared to get beat by me."

Dean scoffs, scratching at his palms and staring at the motes flickering in the light around Sam's head. "In your dreams."

"In yours," Sam points out. Dean brushes that aside as easily as a piece of lint.

"Not scared of you, Sammy."

Sam makes a smile that hangs warped, tortured and half-aborted, and he says, "Then catch me."

He disappears again, poof, and rematerializes so close that Dean can smell the clean scent of sweat and chaff and subterranean lake water. Dean can feel him everywhere. Sam's lips brush his ear as he says, "Catch me, Dean," and then Sam is gone.

Dean wakes up.

And Sam is gone again.

THE END

candlebeck.


End file.
